Black Panther: Wakanda Forever struggles to match the power of the 2018 Black Panther film without original star Chadwick Boseman.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the 30th film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
Add to that all the DC Comics films, and the Spiderverse and X-Men movies and the number becomes astronomical.
But as I say, like Adaptation's John Laroche and his fish, I've had enough.
For a start, they're too damn big now. I mean, if you can do pretty much anything, then why should I care about you?
They're also increasingly shallow. Character development is pretty much limited to the initial Origin Story, which I can sum up as follows. Started out not super. Becomes super. The end.
Yes I know, with great power and so on…. But that's not enough to fill up 30-plus movies, is it? And above everything, my issue with the last few years of comic-book movies is they're so unfocused.
With great cast lists come a great number of subplots that need servicing, and frankly in most stories - from Oedipus Rex and Hamlet to Mrs Harris Goes to Paris - you really only need one lead character.
The original Iron Man was about a self-centred billionaire who became a halfway decent person.
Captain America was a 1940s Boy Scout hero flung into today's complicated, film noir world.
Thor was an entitled prince suddenly stripped of everything and starting from scratch.
Pretty good setups all, but where do you go from there? The answer was to make them bigger, but not particularly better, to make them more crowded, but not particularly more complex or interesting.
This from a fan of great big movies - the sort that only cinema can pull off.
The new Black Panther's major failing is the inevitable hole in the middle, caused by the death of star Chadwick Boseman. Wakanda Forever fills it with lots of subplots.
The original Black Panther movie was a sensation when it came out in 2018, not so much for what it was - another year, another new superhero - but for what it represented.
Suddenly superheroes didn't have to be white, male and American. In this case, he was African, with a mostly all-women support team of warriors.
At home, it was the biggest movie of the year - even bigger than the Marvel all-star Wrestlemania epic Infinity War - and it proved there was a market for a superhero on the right side of history for a change.
But tragically, personable star Chadwick Boseman fell victim to cancer, and writer-director Ryan Coogler needed a strong sequel without him.
For Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, rather than simply recasting T'Challa - the Black Panther ruler of the kingdom of Wakanda - Coogler wrote his death into the story.
The throne now goes to his mother, Queen Ramonda - Angela Basset - with the other three female leads in attendance - Princess Shuri, General Okoye and T'Challa's ex-girlfriend Nakia. And yes, I did have to look them all up.
Initially, the story centres on Queen Ramonda's anxiety over Wakanda's valuable natural resource Vibranium.
How valuable? Only the most valuable stuff in the world, and with superhero Black Panther gone, those pesky ex-colonising nations want to get their hands on it.
Fat chance. But then the plot takes a left turn to a genius American teen called Riri. She's invented a Vibranium detecting device, and therefore, apparently, needs rescuing by Princess Shuri - the appealing Leticia Wright, and we assume, the new star of the franchise.
Or is she? Mum's also in the picture, as is General Okoye and a large beefy chap called M'Baku.
Just as you're wondering whose story this is exactly, in comes someone else to tip over the card table completely. From the bottom of the ocean, will you welcome the King of Talocan - Namor!
In the comics I'm told - honestly, new Marvel movies require so much tedious homework! - his watery majesty's kingdom was Atlantis. As you'd expect.
But Marvel rivals DC Comics managed to get their Atlantan superhero Aquaman out of the gate first, so now it's the Mayan-based Talocan.
And once he arrives, King Namor pretty much hogs Wakanda Forever. This means that the entire film becomes a battle of accents.
Wakanda folk speak English with thick, all-purpose African accents - don't they speak Wakandan? - while their Talocan foes speak Spanish-accented English, slipping occasionally into ancient Mayan.
And now the story becomes a trade war between Wakanda and Talocan - I forgot to mention that King Namor owns tons of Vibranium too, buried underwater.
Or it's a battle between Namor and the Surface World. Or who gets to be the Black Panther. Or, look out, here comes Martin Freeman and his American spies!
In other words, I can't exactly tell you what the story's about because there's no one at its centre for it to be about.
I'm sure originally it was about Black Panther King T'Challa and his stroppy female sidekicks taking on the dripping Feathered Serpent God. Biff! Splat! Pow! Splosh!
But take the title character out of the story, and no wonder former villain King Namor walks in and takes it over.
As the original Black Panther proved when it trounced the Avengers' Infinity War at the box office, one strong, attractive hero trumps an overcrowded committee of sidekicks every time.
