Wonder Man: the best Marvel series plays it Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (review)

The least superheroic of the MCU series takes the form of a very meta buddy movie behind the scenes of Hollywood, with Ben Kingsley and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as loser actors. Unexpected and very thrilling.

While Marvel Studios is trying on the one hand to reproduce the recipe – and therefore the box office success – of Infinity War and Endgame with Avengers: Doomsday, the firm is shaking up its entire program on the other with the Wonder Man series, which explores territories very far from traditional superheroic concerns. Remember the twist in Iron Man 3 by Shane Black: behind the Mandarin, the supposed big villain of the film, was in fact hiding a failed actor, Trevor Slattery, played by Ben Kingsley in very good form.

Wonder Man makes his hilarious return as a mentor to Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an actor who is struggling because he is too cerebral, in the race for the lead role in a superhero production. Oh, and Simon also has powers that manifest when he loses control of himself, but that’s almost an excuse to bring this mismatched duo together. So much the better: Wonder Man functions above all as a comedy about the backstage of Hollywood, where we wander between iconic locations and more or less chaotic castings of Trevor and Simon.

Everything about it brings back the meta approach of Shane Black (self-aware Marvel series; film within the film…) and it is also not forbidden to think of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in front of this hairy buddy movie in Los Angeles, where no one is really who they say they are. Eight perfectly fun episodes which are obviously reminiscent of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (LA fetishism, Hollywood chill, ups and downs of an actor’s career, Bloody Mary with celery) and the satire The Studio (slick production, shoots that go off the rails…).

Less cynical than the latter on the Hollywood scullery – let’s calm down, we’re staying at Disney -, Wonder Man still allows himself some scathing barbs about the world and superhero films. Surely the mark of its co-creator, Andrew Guest, screenwriter of some of the best episodes of Community – including the one around Dungeons and Dragons.

We could also have cited Entourage as an inspiration, but Wonder Man is certainly not trying to measure herself: in the field of smoked bangers and models in swimsuits, she knows she is beaten in advance. In any case, it’s a Marvel series that doesn’t look like a Marvel series, and it’s surely the brightest idea the studio has had in several years.

Wonder Man, on Disney+, eight episodes in all