Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is the worst kind of actor one can be. Sure, he’s talented; he frequently blows casting agents out of the water on the strength of his auditions, with a mind that instantly catalogs every movie he’s seen and every performance within it. But all that means nothing if he can’t get out of his own way. Simon’s a textbook overthinker, self-conscious to the point of self-obsession. He books small roles in big productions, but loses them just as quickly by requesting presumptive changes to the script. He can’t connect to a character without creating a convoluted backstory that hurts as much as it helps. And perhaps worst of all, he’s suppressing potent, energy-based superpowers, powers that — thanks to a discriminative stipulation called “The Doorman Clause” — legally prevent him from auditioning for most major Hollywood productions. A minor mood swing can trigger a seismic event to rival a baby earthquake. And as a guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve, Simon could probably level the city of Los Angeles without even flinching. In any other Marvel project, he’d be standing toe-to-toe with Thor, the God of Thunder. That his powers feel more like a pesky inconvenience is what plucks Wonder Man out of this franchise’s stuffy self-seriousness and into the realm of an absurdist sitcom. Wonder Man is unlike any offering from Marvel that’s come before. Bafflingly, it’s leagues better than it has any right to be. A winking satire of show business, superhero fatigue, and the artifice of secret identity shouldn’t work within the MCU at all — yet it does, and does so perfectly. That’s largely a credit to Destin Daniel Cretton, who returns after helming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to double down on his affinity for intimate drama. Wonder Man is a damn-near perfect marriage between sympathetic character study and an offbeat superhero origin — but it is above all (and most successfully) a classic buddy comedy. |
