That doesn't mean it's bad, or that it's the worst of the MCU movies (there have certainly been worse), but I wanted this movie to be better than it was. Everyone certainly did their best and tried hard it doing the damn near impossible, but it wasn't enough overall.

Okay, first, the good: The absolutely honored Chadwick Boseman and T'Challa and their collective legacy. Overall, the Namor/Tolokan stuff was very well done. The production design/art direction was fantastic. Winston Duke/M'Baku was excellent, as was Danai Gurira/Okoye. As Lupita/Nakia in here limited screen time. And I thoroughly enjoyed the hallucinatory return of Killmonger.

The bad: the action wasn't all that good and occasionally incomprehensible. The stuff with the US Government/Martin Freeman/Juiie Louis-Dreyfuss was a waste of time beyond some minor world-building and setting up for the third movie. It was waaaay too damn long, which I usually dismiss as a criticism, but I felt it here. Wasn't slow, but it felt like they had at least half an hour of unnecessary stuff.

And, honestly, Shuri works much better a supporting character. I 100% get the decision to make her the focal point, and why they wrote the character this way given what happened, but it just didn't work for me. Even before the movie dropped, I'd hoped they were going to make LLupita/Nakia the next Black Panther, but from the first line of dialogue, it was obvious where the film was going.

But, hey, this movie made a shit-ton of money over weekend, so maybe I'm the asshole. Ad maybe Coogler can figure out how to make the third movie work better with Shuri as the central focus. I certainly want to like these films.