The game-raising partnership of Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan goes beyond Black Panther
It’s probably not fair to say that Black Panther, the Marvel blockbuster that’s already one of the most popular superhero movies of all time, is most interested in its instantly and rightfully praised villain, Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. The exploits of the movie’s title hero (Chadwick Boseman) and various members of his team are also throughly, lovingly captured by director and co-writer Ryan Coogler. But something does happen whenever the movie cuts over to Jordan’s Erik “Killmonger” Stevens: The scenes snap Coogler, and by extension his audience, out of the usual Marvel Cinematic Universe reverie of affection and amusement, bringing them to sharper attention.
This may be unique to an MCU project, but it’s not that unusual for Coogler’s films, in part because he’s a terrific filmmaker, and maybe also because all three of them—Black Panther, Creed, and Fruitvale Station—feature Jordan. It’s not just a case of the camera loving Jordan, though he does have some of that innate star quality. Coogler seems especially fascinated by the actor’s confidence—his lack of obvious attempts to ingratiate himself—and how that can transform the material he’s given.
And Jordan does help transform his material. None of his movies with Coogler are exactly unpredictable in terms of pure plot. This is even true of the groundbreaking Black Panther. On paper, Jordan’s Erik follows an arc familiar to the MCU: He shares a semi-secret history with the film’s costumed protagonist, spends his early scenes isolated from the other main characters as he gathers his resources and prepares to surprise the hero, and is pitted against that hero in a battle in which he functions as a mirror image, even donning his own panther-like supersuit.
Yet by handing this Marvel boilerplate over to Jordan, Coogler turns a well-worn structure into an affecting strategy. Erik’s backstory, revealed well into the film, depends on his being left behind by the futuristic but closed-off country of Wakanda, abandoned in Coogler’s hometown of Oakland following the death of his revolutionary father. He’s one of the weightiest MCU villains, but Jordan doesn’t charge straight into operatic intensity or even normal scenery-chewing. While most of the Wakanda characters speak in African-accented English that sounds regal and precise, Erik has a more colloquial American style, in which Jordan finds a wry musicality. His understated greeting of “Hey, auntie,” directed at Wakandan royalty Ramonda (Angela Bassett), has a cultural specificity lacking from the MCU’s easier laugh lines, and a human dimension sorely lacking from, say, the Red Skull. Jordan’s performance depends on these small gestures, like when Erik addresses his Wakandan associates from the throne and taps his finger to betray a nervous energy behind his authority. Most supervillain performances play, with an understandable theatricality, to the audience. Jordan’s speech patterns and little gestures are more self-possessed.
Coogler uses his gift for imagery to support Jordan’s actorly choices, like the scene in which Erik approaches the Wakanda border with a crucial dead body in tow. This brief moment has a texture often lacking in comics movies, a kind of magic-hour idyll that nonetheless depicts an angry revolutionary carting around a corpse. Coogler also employs one of his favorite cinematic devices, the following shot, in which the camera pursues its subject. Killmonger isn’t the only one who gets this treatment; Boseman’s T’Challa has one of his own as he approaches his crowning ceremony. But the most striking version in the movie stays on Killmonger’s back, not Black Panther’s. As Erik assumes the Wakandan throne, the camera begins upside down and makes a full, deliberate 180-degree turn, both a stylish image and a crystallization of the moment when Killmonger transitions from angry outsider to the man in charge.
Jordan’s willingness to be still, and explode with emotion when needed, seem to embolden Coogler’s nervier instincts. This was the case before Black Panther, when Coogler made another franchise movie that gave him even more stylistic flexibility. Creed, in which Jordan plays the illegitimate son of Rocky Balboa’s opponent-turned-buddy Apollo Creed, isn’t building an expansion on an expensive, elaborate, ongoing piece of Marvel architecture, but working off of a series bible written mostly (and haphazardly) by Rocky star and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone. This allows Coogler and Jordan to reshape the material and make the best Rocky movie since the first one.
Creed doesn’t give Jordan a lot of dialogue upfront. Adonis Creed’s first lines in the movie are spoken by an actor playing him as a kid, and he’s first seen as an adult getting himself psyched up for a fight before the camera follows him up some stairs, mostly in shadow, and into the boxing ring. Other early scenes, all providing the character with degrees of standoffishness, rely on his seething intensity—and accompanying sense of isolation. Even his first conversation with his love interest, Bianca (Tessa Thompson), gets abruptly curtailed as she slams a door in his face.
It’s a neat, subtle trick Coogler plays to maintain Creed’s underdog status despite what appears to be a more privileged background than Balboa. The fact that Jordan’s ultra-persistent Creed doesn’t replicate the aw-shucks humility of Rocky counts as a bold gambit in a big-studio environment that demands selfless gestures, cardboard villains, children in peril… anything to score some more precious likability. Creed works so well because Jordan spends so little time asking for approval, which gives his late-movie mid-fight admission to Balboa, that he’s fighting to prove that he’s not a “mistake,” the force of a major body blow.
Despite Creed’s boxing legacy, the movie succeeds in keeping its characters at ground level, which Coogler emphasizes with more following shots. Some of them have a traditional boxer-into-the-ring iconic grandeur, while others, like Creed’s entrance into Bianca’s apartment, are more intimate, bringing the audience along with the character rather than staring in awe at his majesty. There’s a similar sense of intimacy in the sequence when Coogler follows Jordan and Stallone together from a Philadelphia street, up some stairs, and around the floor of a boxing gym, simply because after a lot of scenes that isolate Jordan, the two stars share the frame for nearly the entire length of the unbroken shot.