'Wonder Man' Suzanne Tenner/Marvel Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Simon Williams, the lead of Disney+'s Wonder Man, is no superhero. I don't mean he's a future Avenger yet to come into his potential - he's just not a superhero in any sense, and has no desire to become one. Nor is he any kind of villain, though like any of us he has his bad days. No, Simon, an aspiring actor played by former DC supervillain Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is that rarest of Marvel protagonists: a totally regular person, albeit one blessed (or saddled) with unexplained hidden powers. Wonder Man The Bottom Line More human than superhuman. Airdate: Tuesday, Jan. 27 (Disney+)Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Ben Kingsley, Arian Moayed, X Mayo, Zlatko BuricCreators: Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Guest Perhaps this should make him less interesting than the likes of Spider-Man or Captain America, who can't seem to step outside for coffee without being whisked into one galaxy-hopping adventure or another. Simon's most dramatic chase, by contrast, is tracking a scooter-riding brat through Los Angeles gridlock. But Wonder Man turns Simon's ordinariness into its secret weapon, delivering a dramedy that's all the more charming for being so low-key. Related Stories Movies 'Bone Temple' Director Nia DaCosta Is Building a Formidable Resume on Her Childhood Obsessions Movies 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' Shooting Wraps As the second title released under the "Marvel Spotlight" banner, following 2024's Echo, Wonder Man is a standalone affair. Well, mostly. The Disney+ series finds Simon looking for his big break, and then stumbling into an irresistible opportunity when he meets Ben Kingsley's Trevor Slattery - whom fans will recall as the oddball thespian revealed in 2013's Iron Man 3 to be posing as the terrorist Mandarin, though the show provides enough context for even non-fans to get up to speed. (Trevor also appeared in 2021's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who co-created Wonder Man with Andrew Guest, but that's less relevant to the plot.) Now just a working actor like any other, Trevor tips Simon off to the auditions for Wonder Man, a remake of Simon's favorite 1980s action movie. The two couldn't be more different in temperament: Simon overthinks his roles to the point of self-sabotage; Trevor is all impulse and intuition. Simon is so reserved that even his live-in girlfriend (an egregiously underused Olivia Thirlby) has given up on him; Trevor is a kooky gadabout who'd be right at home trading druggy celebrity anecdotes with Oliver Putnam. They nevertheless become fast friends, drawn together by two major commonalities. The biggest is a sincere passion for their craft. These are men who bond by reciting their favorite monologues at each other, who absolutely mean it when they tell Joe "Everybody Calls Me Joey Pants" Pantoliano (in a highly amusing cameo) that acting is the "single most consequential" calling a person could possibly hope for in life. Abdul-Mateen and Kingsley are adorable in their bromance, the former's combination of confidence and neediness playing against the latter's oddball sense of humor. Their chemistry, fun and fizzy with a hint of melancholy, is the main reason to watch Wonder Man - more so than any big shocking twists (there aren't any) or action thrills (there is one important fight scene in eight half-hour episodes) or weighty themes (this isn't really that kind of show). Trevor and Simon also share, unbeknownst to Simon, the interest of the Department of Damage Control. Desperate to fill up their new state-of-the-art prison with "enhanced individuals" in order to justify the enormous budget granted to them by the government - a situation with definitely no real-life resonance at all - they're looking to lock up any superpowered being who might possibly be conceived of as dangerous. So Simon is seen as a viable target, thanks to some vague ion-based (don't ask me) ability to blow things up, and Trevor is blackmailed by ambitious agent Cleary (Arian Moayed) into helping entrap him. To the extent that Wonder Man has a villain, it's a system that targets minority populations under the callous pretense of "security." Simon's reality is one where studios have banned all superpowered performers following a tragic incident (dramatized in an episode-length black-and-white flashback starring Byron Bowers as DeMarr "Doorman" Davis and Josh Gad as an entertainingly douchey version of himself), and where the DODC has no qualms about detaining people who've committed no crimes. The stakes might be low in the sense that no one's trying to stop the manifestation of depression or an otherwordly entity from smiting the planet, but they're astronomical from Simon's perspective: If his secret were to