Review by C.J. Bunce
If Marvel has had one constant since beginning the famous Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s been the challenge of intertwining so many creations of one mind–Stan Lee. And that includes the Stan Lee origin story, slightly altered every time but so much repeated, in the likes of Captain America, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Deadpool, Luke Cage. But go back to The Incredible Hulk–the 1970s television series well before the MCU–and you see that Bill Bixby and Mariette Hartley (who won an Emmy for her performance) made their superhero series stand out because of their incredible chemistry and charm. Flash forward a few years to a small, unusual superhero story starring John Ritter called Hero at Large. This time the superhero wasn’t a hero at all, just an actor playing a superhero who must find it within himself to become a real hero. Ritter, an actor playing an actor, pulled something out of that script and made the movie something special, something memorable.
Chemistry and charm are the ingredients Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley create seemingly out of whole cloth to make a new spin on Hero at Large in the new Disney/Marvel series Wonder Man. If you can hold onto your patience for the first hour or so of this four hour origin story and ignore all the piled-on Hollywood self-reflection, you’ll meet two performers, one a relative newcomer but very talented, the other an 82-year-old, Oscar-winning master of the craft. They build a superhero origin story like you haven’t seen before. It happens through the actors’ chemistry and a script with a singular charm.
For the 17th Marvel TV series, the studio brought back Ben Kingsley’s actor Trevor Slattery, the guy who was posing as the terrorist called the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, only to reprise the role and turn the character on end for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, where the actor brought comedy to the part as he got caught up in the Ten Rings clan plot. He was the right character to tap from a source pool of literally hundreds to co-lead this TV experiment–a stunt–like Wonder Man.
What’s it about? Simon Williams always wanted to be an actor, stemming from a good father that took him out of school to watch a retrospective screening of his favorite movie, the original Wonder Man, a within a movie that in our reality, never actually was. Flash forward to adulthood and Simon learns his favorite movie is about to be remade. Simon is an actor so far relegated to some good stage work and lesser commercial jobs. He meets the great thespian Trevor Slattery who mentions his own plan to try for the Wonder Man role. Taking another guy’s job prospect and finagling your way into an audition is a no-no, but he does it anyway, and later both Simon and Trevor are called back for a tryout in front of the famous director (they could have used someone like Ron Howard as himself, as Howard did in Only Murders in the Building, but opted for a fictional famous fellow). The surprise is that Trevor is still in trouble for his Mandarin fiasco from Iron Man 3 and he’s blackmailed by the government into spying on Simon, who the government believes to be a super-powered individual–potentially dangerous to America. While they compete for the role, Trevor’s kindly nature and dramatic skills take over and he turns into a sort of mentor for Simon. When Simon pays attention he finds it puts his career ahead. Suddenly we have two guys who work well together, not quite the Odd Couple, but something new, maybe a bromance, maybe just newfound friends.
As Simon, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II–who has done the superhero movie bit before as the villain alongside DC Comics’ big screen Aquaman–is very much that same struggling actor John Ritter played in Hero at Large, that Richard Dreyfuss played in The Goodbye Girl, that Dustin Hoffman played in Tootsie, that Kevin Kline played in Dave. He’s an actor playing an actor, and if you’ve known aspiring professional actors personally then Simon Williams will be very familiar to you.
This is a superhero movie, right? It turns out the writers threw every superhero trope out the window. What are Simon Williams’ super powers? We don’t know, something involving a lot of power, and we only get a glimpse of it at the end. Where is the inspiring training montage? Where are the drawn-out death scenes or horrors of his youth that fuel the rage or sorrow or whatever to propel the superhero upward? Where is the flashy supersuit and cape? Nearly a dozen writers worked on this series, and somehow the novelty of the approach and “L.A. Story” tale come together to make something worth watching. Episode 4, “Doorman,” will be on our list of the best episodes this year–one of those dangerous flashback episodes that steps away from pushing the plot forward for some catch-up information. The flashback episode is often the worst episode of any series, but here they got it right.
Kingsley has that same kind of prowess we’ve seen from Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen–all in this exclusive club of OEMs and Dames and Knights from jolly old England. So what better way to showcase his skills than to have him be a mentor to the actor–mentor to the superhero hiding within an actor played by an actor. You’ll watch his quiet delivery of lines, some serious, some wacky, and you’ll be left wishing everyone could be so lucky to succeed and attain that kind of skill and mastery of their craft as Kingsley and maintain it at age 82.
It’s not a perfect show. Every other series seems to be someone’s latest “love letter to Hollywood,” something that impresses folks in L.A. and fans of movies and TV, but even for them it’s piled on pretty thick here, to the point that you must be made from some kind of vibranium to make it through the first episodes without saying “Ugh, get on with it already.”
The superhero Wonder Man was created by Stan Lee and artists Don Heck and Jack Kirby, and premiered in The Avengers Issue #9 in 1964. But none of that matters to the series, because frankly that character’s comic book history is a convoluted mash-up of several other Stan Lee characters. So stepping away from the source material was a wise decision here. There’s a movie within the show being created, a remake of a movie we only get to see the barest snips from, presumably more loyal to the comic book roots. It’s difficult not to want to see the full, dated, vintage Wonder Man original movie from Wonder Man the series, and for most of the movie you’ll want to see what the final Wonder Man movie remake looks like, too. Until the end. There’s a major shift that changes your perspective. The writers do something that make you not care anymore. It doesn’t matter how the final movie plays out. And that’s a good thing. The humans are more fascinating than the superhero plot could ever be.
The charisma and charm of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley forge the kind of chemistry a dynamic duo should have. So where can they go from here? The Marvel Spotlight banner seems like it’s the MCU way of sidelining a superhero story. This is a “one and done” series. Hopefully they don’t do that here. But the final episode also ties up the important threads.
The series includes Zlatko Burić as the famous movie director, X Mayo as Trevor and Simon’s agent, Arian Moayed as a government agent, Demetrius Grosse as Simon’s brother, Olivia Thirlby as Simon’s ex-girlfriend, and Byron Bowers as the super-powered DeMarr Davis. Plus Josh Gad, Joe Pantoliano, and Mario Lopez as themselves. Count Josh Gad as a comedy god for taking on this role. An MCU Phase VI project under the Marvel Spotlight banner, the eight episodes of Wonder Man are now all streaming on Disney+. Propelling to the top tier of the 17 Marvel television series within the MCU, it’s a fresh look at the superhero genre you won’t want to miss. So don’t.
