Wonder Man Series Review: The Greatest Virtue Not Looking Like Marvel!
Wonder Man Series Review and Ratings
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Lauren Glazier, Demetrius Grosse, Byron Bowers, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jon Abrahams, Charlotte Ross, Arian Moayed, David Moskowitz
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton, Stella Meghie
Streaming Platform: Disney+
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars)
Wonder Man arrives on Disney+ with an idea that almost goes against the grain of the recent Marvel playbook: remove urgency, remove apocalypse, remove the “count” with the big MCU design. The recently concluded parties were accompanied by the somewhat’ surprise arrival of the first teaser officer of Avengers: Doomsday, the next big piece of the MCU, as well as (probably) a last-ditch attempt to bring the Marvel Cinematic Universe back to the levels of relevance it was a few years ago. However, this is not the last act of the Marvel Film and Television Universe for 2025. It arrives on Disney+ subscriber screens today, Wonder Man, an eight-episode TV series starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Sir Ben Kingsley’s return to the MCU.
After the conclusion of the shaky Phase Five, which passed between highs (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Thunderbolts*) and bass (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Captain America: Brave New World), and the increasingly evident superhero fatigue that has struck even the most loyal audience, the Marvel Studios I’m in the midst of a reorganization. A return to the origins, if you will, with fewer titles tied to their now boundless narrative universe to be released throughout the year, both in theaters and on the platform (yes, because in the meantime, TV series have also arrived to further inflate the market for superhero products).
Wonder Man Series Review: The Story Plot
Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is one of the many actors of high hopes who pass from one audition to the next, waiting for Los Angeles give them the long-awaited big break. Simon, it must be said, doesn’t put his own effort into helping fate, or perhaps he puts too much of it into it: his ability to get under the character’s skin to the point of requiring constant adjustments to the script and set doesn’t seem to be very successful in Studios. The turning point seems to come when, by chance, it meets (by chance?) Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley) in a semi-deserted cinema. Chatting with the man who once played the Mandarin (you remember Iron-Man 3?), Simon discovers that the famous director Von Kovak (Zlatko Buri) is working on a modern remake of a classic childhood film, Wonder Man, a role he has dreamed of playing since he was a child.
Wonder Man Review and Analysis
Try to trace a trajectory of the MCU based on the most recent productions is always very complicated, mainly for two reasons: the first is the frequent changes of course dependent on external factors that change the game at least a couple of times a year; the second is the long productive tail post-Covid that led Marvel Studio to reschedule, postpone, and fit series and films into a different calendar than originally planned. Based on what we have seen in the last two products of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, namely Thunderbolts, Ironheart, and the latter Wonder Man, it would be said that there is an intention to bring some of the MCU back to Earth, in the most literal sense of the term.
Even in the case of Wonder Man, in fact, the events told in the eight episodes they start from roots that are firmly in the soil: a well-defined and recognizable setting, which becomes an integral part of the imagination in which the story and many real, concrete sets are immersed, with the use of CGI limited (at least as far as perceptible) only to the necessary. The reference is in series as The Bear, in which the city in which the protagonists move is not just a backdrop, but a living, real, pulsating, and problematic environment, which affects the lives of those who share its spaces. The intention seems (always at the moment, eh) to use series to tell smaller, more intimate, more personal stories, which can show what happens at street level in a world where beings with divine powers move. And to tell a movie story, there is no better city in the world than Los Angeles.
Moreover, Hollywood has a long history of productions through which it told what happens where films are born: American cinema likes to talk about itself. Wonder Man fits squarely into this trend that plays with the idiosyncrasies of agents, screenwriters, directors, and all the other big-screen professionals, but unfortunately, he does it without having much to add. It is never a good approach to evaluate a product based on what it could or should have been, but after almost 20 years since the first historic Iron Man it was fair to think that the MCU was ready to make a little joke’ about itself, to stage all those clichés that abound in the speeches about him, to magart you even just to exorcise them.
Instead, the superhero movie machine that emerges from Wonder Man is a rather generic reproduction, similar to the many others already seen in other films or series, without, however, any dose of self-irony or polish, that is, the secret of the success of products such as The Studio (or of our native and still appreciated Boris). The only impetus is the figure of Von Kovak, fictional director of committed works who decides to dedicate himself to a comic film: I’d like to think the character was conceived as a way to laugh at the bizarre and often unfounded claims of MCU directors who cyclically announce that they’ve inspired timeless masterpieces of the seventh art to stage their costumed dude battles; but in practice, it feels more like a somewhat grotesque and over-the-top depiction of the directors who are just busy (and since the production timelines add up, the fact that the context reminded me The Brutalist it might not be a coincidence).
If, in the case of Ironheart, the city in which the story moved served to put on the plate themes and issues to reason about (even without ever digging too deep, we are still in the MCU), the Hollywood of Wonder Man is a wasted opportunity. Just as it is interesting to discover how the galactic events of superheroes influence the lives of ordinary people who walk down to earth, it would have been interesting to find out how cinema in the MCU reacted to the presence of being in costume, deciding the fate of the world to the sound of dicks. Instead, beyond the characterization of agents, actors, producers, and laborers according to the stereotypes of comedy, all that remains of the relationship between cinema and superheroes is a long flashback that explains the reasons for the Studios’ policies on the presence of superhumans on sets.
Too bad Wonder Man struggles to really bond the powers of Simon Williams to his internal conflict, even after revealing to the viewer why these should be hidden. It could also be a good starting point on which to build something and add levels of depth to the character, to whom Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives a more than dignified performance, and for whose debut he even bothered a level actor like Ben Kingsley. Instead, in all likelihood, in Simon Williams’ future, there will be an appearance in the choral action of Doomsday, and then who knows. Hollywood can be really ruthless sometimes.
This Wonder Man series is strange, resembling the recent The Studio, created by and starring Seth Rogen, which is a classic superhero subject. A comedy that delights in poking fun at the Hollywood dream factory, with its mechanisms and fixations. You make fun of things like actors with a penchant for the Method acting (Simon is fired from the new season set of American Horror Story due to his excessive fussiness) and the European artistoid directors, who came to revolutionize and ennoble the Hollywood blockbuster through their own personal sensibility (Zlatko Burić, the dictator of Boravia of Superman by James Gunn).
The heart of the entire story is the relationship that develops between the young actor Simon and the more experienced Trevor, who becomes a sort of mentor to the protagonist, the latter totally unaware of his true intentions. Of course, Trevor will also begin to grow fond of his protégé, leading him to question whether completing his mission is the right thing to do. A classic bromance from a buddy movie, a genre that the MCU had already touched on in Iron Man 3 by Shane Black, a film in which the character played by Oscar-winning Ben Kingsley was introduced.
Wonder Man certainly has some interesting elements, but it’s a product that leaves you mostly disoriented. A series that risks being too un-superheroic for MCU fans (the action and special effects are really stripped down to the bare minimum), and with almost no connection to the bigger picture of the narrative universe, and too crude to compare with the brilliant humor of productions like The Studio. Furthermore, the running time is disproportionate for this type of story; half of its total four-hour length (the miniseries consists of eight half-hour episodes) would have been more than enough to tell such a story.
Wonder Man Review: The Last Words
Wonder Man is one of the series dedicated to minor characters that Marvel Television began developing during the studio’s bulimic production period, when the intent was to replenish the catalog of the then-new Disney+. An anomalous series, where the superhero elements are stripped down to the bare minimum in favor of a Hollywood-set comedy à la The Studio. While interesting at times, the production risks being too unsuperheroic for MCU fans and too crude to compete with the brilliant humor of series like Seth Rogen’s aforementioned creature. Furthermore, the excessive length of this type of story, spanning four hours in total, does not help.
