You cannot convince me that this was better than that scrapped Batwoman movie.
Warner Bros. and DC are in a very unstable place right now. The recent disarray and chaos going on at that company has resulted in a lot of rash and bad decision-making. And even though most recently they made a somewhat smart choice in appointing James Gunn to oversee the creative direction of DC, there’s still a lot of mess to be waded through -especially with the talks of leaning back into that dreary Zack Snyder continuity of the cinematic universe. And nothing better sets up that trajectory than Black Adam, by far DC’s dullest movie since that original cut of Justice League.
There are a lot of issues with this movie, but none as overwhelming as just how lifeless and boring the whole thing is. Its’ stakes have no weight, its’ characters are even less engaging, and its’ script is pathetically uninspired and forceful. Worst of all, its’ lead (likely the only reason it did get a release over Batwoman), Dwayne Johnson is stripped of the charisma that accounts for most of his star power. I never thought I’d see him a charmless, humourless drone, but that’s what he plays for much of this movie.
His character, Teth-Adam (renamed Black Adam at the end of the movie) is a 26th century B.C. mythological champion of the kingdom of Kahndaq, who harnesses the powers of Shazam, saying the magic word and gaining super-strength, speed, flight, etc. He is reawakened in the modern Kahndaq, a country in the Middle-East, during a skirmish between regime soldiers and a resistance movement over the Crown of Sabbac, an artefact that wields great power historically belonging to Kahndaq’s ruler. It becomes the driving Macguffin of the piece, fought over by the antagonizing forces and the rebel archaeologists who befriend Adam, with something called the Justice Society, made up of several B-tier superheroes, getting involved to apprehend and rein in Adam.
It sounds pretty chaotic and it is, but not in any kind of interesting way. The movie is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who must have been brought in by Johnson after they worked together on Jungle Cruise. But he is far more out of his element on this piece, not having much in the way of script or performance strengths to distract from the weak, very by-the-numbers directing. Mostly he seems to be borrowing the aesthetic techniques of other directors who’ve worked in this universe to make it feel cohesive. There’s some Patty Jenkins influence going on, but mostly he appropriates that Snyder fetishism -of Batman v. Superman but also perhaps more explicitly, 300. There is a lot of slow-motion digitally-enhanced fight choreography in this, a lot of that strongman symbolism and visual coding that Snyder had made so prominent with his Superman. Of course the movie opines a particularly cheeky relationship to Superman, with multiple instances of his iconography accidentally destroyed by Adam.
That touch of harmless juvenilia is reflected in the movies’ need to emphasize Adam as NOT being a hero, but yet also can’t of course make him a villain. And so there all these allusions to a dark character who’s not really all that dark -Johnson interprets the performance as just stoic and serious, which he cannot do well. At times the movie wants you to take it seriously, but elsewhere acquiesces to the joke of it all, such as in Adam’s frequent killing of adversaries to the chagrin and frankly insufferable moralizing of the Justice Society’s Hawkman, played by an underserved Aldis Hodge. It seems only there to once more assert Adam in contrast to other heroes with stricter moral codes, or just to clap back at the criticisms of earlier DC movies and the indiscriminate body counts amassed by figures like Superman and Batman.
If that is in fact the case, its’ stand-in for the critics are the wet blanket foursome of the Justice Society, who generally feel like a collection of characters you might see in The Boys rather than heroes in a major comics production meant with sincerity. Hawkman’s self-righteous insistence on never killing anyone borders on parody as much as Adams’ casual death count (I also don’t think its’ an accident the movie chooses a premise in which these victims are uniformly not white). Meanwhile Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who has the powers of Ant-Man and the costume of Deadpool, is just a clumsy teen doofus eager to impress, nurturing a crush on the wind-powered Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), who has little more character than some vaguely defined trauma. They are led by Pierce Brosnan as the sage-like Doctor Fate, a seeming combination of Doctor Strange and Professor X, who is nonetheless the only character with any real life in him, owing entirely to Brosnan’s smooth delivery. The civilian rebel characters, though more closely aligned with Adam, aren’t much better realized. And much as Sarah Shahi may try to convey a sense of gravitas, her son will reliably be there to rebuke it.
On top of all of this, the movie just looks awful. Though it’s not quite the same muted cinematography and colour grading of Marvel, it’s drenched in a dour brownness, the lazy standard for Hollywood depicting anything in the Middle East. Additionally the editing is atrocious -I didn’t think I could see a worse patched-together movie in a month than Bros, but Black Adam easily tops it. There’s one scene where a character is pontificating to a group of others for about two minutes, and yet it cuts to a new reaction shot some thirty times. And this is just one of several egregious examples, this movie seemingly deathly afraid to show the camera moving yet also not wanting to be fixated on one shot for more than ten seconds. It suggests an incompetence on the part of the directing, that Collet-Serra could conceive no other dynamic ways to shoot the scenes or that the production was choppy, having to work around the casts’ schedules and thus piece them into a sequence inorganically.
There’s a bizarre plot beat where Black Adam surrenders his powers and is taken out of the action only to then be called upon by the very people who apprehended him some fifteen minutes later to of course save the day in the climax, Marwan Kenzari’s lame villain (one of several lately played by him) by then transformed fully into nothing more than a video game boss. What follows is both as erratic and boring a superhero climax as you can imagine, with a resolution just as mediocre that still pretends Adam is in any way much of a real antihero in his relationship to the “good ones”. At every turn of even menial moral ambiguity, he is presented as genuinely good-hearted, tragic backstory and everything. Not wanting to be called a hero is a matter of semantics.
In the end it doesn’t matter much though as the only appealing facet of Black Adam, The Rock playing a superhero, is extremely underwhelming and devoid of any of the reasons that it would be a cool prospect to begin with. It is doubtless the most dreadful comic book movie of the year; dry, uninteresting, overzealous yet underwritten, and poorly constructed by most metrics -perfectly indicative of the DC and Warner Bros. brand as it currently stands.
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