Wonder Man Review

Wonder Man is a Hollywood comedy that happens to be set in the Marvel universe, and reviewers treat that as a relief. Simon Williams can lift a car and cannot get a callback, and the show is far more interested in the humiliations of the audition room than in anything he can do with his hands. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the reason it works, playing want and self doubt with a lightness his film roles have not asked for, and Ben Kingsley returning as Trevor Slattery gives the series its funniest and oddest scenes.

Critics praise the smaller scale, the industry satire and the willingness to leave the wider franchise alone for whole episodes. The complaints are about shape. The pace is slow by design and sometimes just slow, the few action beats feel dropped in from a different production, and the season takes a while to decide what its story is. It is a modest, character led piece from a studio that had forgotten how to make one, and the modesty is the achievement.