Josh Reviews Wonder Man

Hold the presses! The latest Marvel TV show on Disney+, Wonder Man, is terrific!!

I feel like the general public hasn’t been as excited about new MCU projects in recent days, especially the Disney+ TV shows.  But don’t miss this one!!  It’s perfectly calibrated so that total MCU newbies will be able to love and appreciate this series just as much as hard-core fans.

Wonder Man stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Simon Williams, who is desperately trying to succeed as an actor in Hollywood, despite years of rejection.  Simon is clearly talented, but he has a tendency to get in his own way and dramatically overthink things.  Simon strikes up an unexpected friendship with Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley, reprising his role from Iron Man Three and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), a veteran actor who made the unfortunate choice of playing the terrorist “The Mandarin.”  (Oops.)  Simon and Trevor want to get cast in the new big-budget super-hero movie Wonder Man, a reboot of as cheesy movie that Simon loved as a kid.  Getting cast in this blockbuster movie would be hard enough, but Simon also has to hide his super-powers from the world, while Trevor is being blackmailed to investigate and expose him.

I loved this show!  Consisting of only eight half-hour episodes, the show zips by at a pleasingly brisk pace.  It’s very funny (this show is closer to The Studio than it is to, say, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), and also very sweet.  I fell in love with the friendship between Simon & Trevor and was quickly rooting with all my heart for these two goofballs to somehow find a way to succeed in Hollywood.  The “inside-Hollywood” aspect of the show — exploring the trials and tribulations of trying to make it as an actor — gives Wonder Man a dimension beyond what you’d see in a typical MCU show.  It’s part of why I think this show would be very appealing even to viewers who aren’t so deep into the MCU.

The show rests on the two lead performances of Mr. Abdul-Mateen & Mr. Kingsley, and they are both terrific!!  I’ve been a fan of Mr. Abdul-Mateen’s for a while (he was attention-grabbing in both Watchmen & Aquaman), and so it’s fun to see how he’a allowed to shine here.  He’s able to demonstrate his charisma and his considerable dramatic chops, and he also gets to be silly and funny!  This is a winning combination.

Then there is Ben Kingsley, who I already knew was magnificent in this role of Trevor Slattery.  He stole the show in both Iron Man Three and Shang-Chi, and it is an absolute pleasure to see him again here, now in a leading role!  They make one important change to his character here.  Before, Trevor was always a joke and a punchline.  But here, while he’s allowed to still be very funny, we also see at the same time that Trevor os actually a great actor!  Whereas before, the joke was that Trevor took himself way too seriously as an “act-or”, here we see that his self-seriousness is actually well-earned, and he seems to have more integrity as a performer than others (such as his nemesis Joe Pantoliano, who appears playing himself in a very funny role.)  This is a smart change.  It allows us to like and respect Trevor, even while we can still laugh at his antics.  Mr. Kingsley’s comedic timing is impeccable.  (The sequence in which he insists on waiting before replying to Simon’s text, narrating what he might have been doing instead of waiting over-eagerly for that text, was magnificent!)

I quite enjoyed X Mayo as Janelle, Simon’s supportive but often very frustrated agent.  It’s funny to see Zlatko Burić (who played President Ghurkos in James Gunn’s Superman) appear here in the MCU as director Von Kovak.  I already mentioned Joe Pantoliano (who appeared back in the day in an early Marvel movie: the underrated Fox Daredevil movie), who is great fun as a silly version of himself who may or may not have stolen a role away from Trevor Slattery back in their early years.  Speaking of actors playing themselves: I loved every second of Josh Gad’s pivotal appearance in episode four.  They wrote a great role for Mr. Gad, one that makes perfect use of his talents and his persona, and I give great credit to Mr. Gad for being up for the fun way in which they used him.  Byron Bowers is terrific in that same episode as DeMarr Davis/Doorman; he’s both funny and tragic.  It’s a great performance!

The series was created by Destin Daniel Cretton & Andrew Guest.  Mr. Cretton directed Shang-Chi (which explains his love for Trevor Slattery!) and he also directed the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.  Mr. Guest wrote for such great TV comedies as Community, 30 Rock, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Brockmire, and he was a producer on Hawkeye.  Mr. Guest wrote or co-wrote five of the series’ eight episodes, and Mr. Cretton directed the first two.  Their skills seem to merge beautifully with this series, which is very funny while at the same time telling a story with emotional depth and stakes.  This is a great accomplishment.

Stop reading here if you haven’t watched this series yet.  Go watch it!!

SPOILERS ahead…

I’ve always had a sweet spot for the character of Wonder Man/Simon Williams from the comics.  (I loved the dramatic way John Byrne used the character in his all-time classic run on West Coast Avengers back in the late eighties; no one else has ever written Simon that well!)  They’ve made a LOT of changes to the character for this show, but I quite like what they did!  They kept the concept of Simon as an actor with super-powers, which made me happy.  Simon has often been portrayed as having feet of clay, and being a far more fallible super-hero than many of his heroic comrades.  I was happy that aspect also made it into the show.  The rest of Simon has been completely reinvented here, but I think they made strong choices, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II did a great job bringing Simon to life.  I really liked this show’s version of Simon, and I’m glad they developed him as a fully-realized human being, rather than focusing on the super-heroics.

Going into this show, I wondered whether there would be much super-hero action.  There isn’t, but one of the many successes of this show is that I didn’t mind!  I thoroughly invested in Simon and Trevor’s very human dreams of success as actors, and I loved following them along that small-scale story.  This wasn’t a show in which I was waiting and waiting for the big super-hero fights to start happening.  This is a big part of what makes this show work so well for all types of viewers; this isn’t just a niche super-hero show.

I did of course smile that they found ways to work in aspects of the comic book version of the character, such as showing us fans cosplaying in various versions of Simon’s comic book costume.  That made me very happy!

The only tiny off-note in the show for me was the MCU’s continued mis-use of Damage Control.  I loved the classic Damage Control comics from the eighties!!  The series was created by Dwayne McDuffie & Ernie Colón; it was a funny look at the people who have to clean up after all the super-hero fights in New York.  When Damage Control was first introduced into the MCU in Spider-Man: Homecoming, I was happy!!  But while in that first appearance Damage Control was involved in cleaning up after superhero fights, in recent MCU appearances they’ve just been used as a generic evil replacement for S.H.I.E.L.D., which is how they’re used here.  I don’t like it at all.  It’s a misuse of this great concept, and frankly it’s just boring.  Why does Damage Control have a huge prison??  (If they need a prison, why aren’t they just using The Raft, which we saw in Captain America: Civil War?)  The main evil Damage Control agent we see in this show, played by Arian Moayed, was flat and uninteresting to me.

They made a bold choice to devote a full episode (in this short eight-episode season) to the “Doorman” story, which explains why people with super-powers aren’t allowed to work in movies in the MCU.  I don’t think they needed a full episode to tell this story, and sidelining Trevor and Simon for a full episode is an unconventional choice that I’m not sure was the best use of the show’s narrative real-estate.  That being said, I adored this episode!  I thought it was so funny and so clever.  I can’t believe Josh Gad is dead in the MCU!!!  (Or trapped in the dark dimension or wherever…)  I also LOVED that they brought Doorman into the MCU — that’s a very deep cut.  (It’s also a great reference to John Byrne’s classic run on West Coast Avengers that I’d referenced above!  They even got Doorman’s mask looking perfect, just like in the comics!)  I also thought it was cool that they got James Ponsoldt (the fantastic director who helmed The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour) to direct the “Doorman” episode (in addition to episode 3).  Wow, that was a great get for this series!

Other thoughts:

• I liked seeing Olivia Thirlby in her brief appearance as Simon’s girlfriend in the first episode.  (I loved Ms. Thirlby in the great movie The Wackness, and I’m always happy to see her on-screen.)
• Simon’s brother Eric is a supervillain in the comics, and Simon’s regular nemesis.  I like that the show nodded to that idea by showing us how difficult Simon’s relationship with his brother has been.  (And I liked that the two of them got a small bit of reconciliation at the end.)
• It was never not funny on the show when someone recognized Trevor as the Mandarin.  I particularly loved how excited the snack-maker Esteban and his crew were that the Mandarin was in their house in episode five!
• That fake-out in episode six — in which we briefly think Simon lost control and murdered one of the other actors in the callback workshop at Von Kovak’s home — was very effective!  They really got me for a minute there.
• I’m thrilled that the finale allowed Simon to get his happy ending.  I like that we jumped ahead and saw that everything worked out, he got to star in Wonder Man, and the film was a big success.  And then I loved the final act of the finale, in which we see Simon’s plan to free Trevor.  (I totally called that, by the way — which my family can vouch for!)
• I’d guessed that the show was building to Simon’s having to reveal himself publicly in order to save someone in danger.  I was wrong about that, but I was very happy with what we got, which is Simon’s finally using his super-powers to rescue his friend Trevor.  And we even got to see Simon fly!!  That was great.

This was a fantastic show!  It feels like we’re in the last gasp of the Marvel TV shows on Disney+, but this is a terrific show and well worth your time, whether you’re an MCU fan or not.