Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the Egyptian gods – and imprisoned just as quickly – Black Adam is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world.
There’s something willful about Dwayne’ The Rock’ Johnson marrying his personality to a DC character that’s equal parts grumbling superman and milk dud antihero. That it comes in a downturn for all superhero movies only adds to the disappointment of it all. I’m told Black Adam, a notorious antihero, wants to play among the top tier of DC superhero stories, but realistically, it falls much closer to the bottom. A litany of rote CGI action scenes, unanswered ethical debates, underbaked character stories, and forced comedy so cringey even the most devout acolytes of capedom could be forgiven for wincing, make this movie a tough sell.
The Rock plays Teth-Adam, a slave who fought against his oppressors in the ancient country of Kahndaq. After wizards (you know, the ones from “Shazam!” In, like, 2019?) give him mystical powers, he demolishes his evil king and also blows up the town. Millennia later and an archaeologist in the now oppressed warzone Kahndaq unleashes Adam when soldiers try to kill her and take the evil McGuffin the Crown of Sabbak. Things go awry, though, as we learn Adam has no compunction against killing, doesn’t see himself as a hero, and has more power than God. The Justice Society gets called in to deal with Adam; cue a middle section that’s MORE CG explosions and motion ramping, but they botch it. Then they argue over what’s a hero (where the oppressed citizens of Kahndaq make some very good points about international superheroes failing to intervene in military occupations). There are some final fights wherein Adam sees the danger he is in and surrenders. BUT WAIT! The bad guy wanted to die so he could be reborn as the new Big Bad. This creates a final battle where Adam must use his power without killing the whole town and learn what it means to be a hero.
The greatest crime this movie commits is essentially muzzling The Rock. A known crack-up and one-line enthusiast, this iteration of Black Adam deals with his problems by staring into other people’s eyes as if his answer to every question: I can literally blow people up, and you expect me to do what? The few bits and pieces he gets to show off play like a supremely watered-down version of the only character The Rock has ever had to play. It may grate on audience members to think the best part of The Rock is his ridiculous persona, but after countless ‘cheesy’ movies, maybe we have to accept this is The Rock people genuinely want and move on. If that’s true, then let him do what he does best. The fact that he’s simply eyeing his way through every scene feels tragic on a Shakespearean level.
The film itself rushes you from beginning to end. With a stark (and poorly mixed, did everyone watch this in the same theater mix as me?) voiceover, we learn Adam’s story. Then rush immediately from a poor man’s Zack Snyder voiceover-motion-ramping-montage into an archaeology scene straight into Adam being resurrected. There’s simply no breathing room, and what breaths it takes are often wasted on jokes. It feels like a headrush. We’re dragged, kicking and screaming into beat after beat, only to feel whiplash so severe I massaged my neck.
There’s a great acid test to see the pacing of a movie. I check myself sometimes when I watch things. How long is the longest shot in a dialogue scene? A since-viral tweet that reflected such sentiments showed a scene from the Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” where eight different characters all talk and bounce off each other, but the editor chose to include a single shot of every person taking. It makes a dialogue scene feel lightning fast but also terrifyingly overwhelming. They’re just talking. It’s okay not to show who’s speaking from time to time. My more significant point is Black Adam mimics the same style of editing where every single line has to be in the frame, and every emotional beat has to have its ‘hero shot.’ Peppering the film with so many of these intentional moments makes it feel more like a fan of superhero movies made it rather than someone who understands cinematic pacing. Not everything has to be a staccato rhythm.
The more significant problem of the film resides in how little these characters develop. The Justice Society pays lip service to character arcs by having a ‘team up’ montage, yet none of it adds to anything. The only significant plot points come at the last possible second in the film. My kudos to Aldis Hodge, Noah Centineo, Pierce Brosnan, and Quintessa Swindell, who used as much as possible to make this movie palatable. It’s not their fault their characters feel flat; they weren’t given much to work with. The sinking interest in this supposed team-up led me to start questioning what their Marvel counterparts or analogs might be, and ultimately I decided it flat out doesn’t matter. Why do we care about Hawkman? The answer to this movie seems to be: For movies you might get later.
That’s what frustrates me the most out of all of this. I’m by no means a Marvel stalwart. My fandom has fallen by the wayside as I understand arguments against such corporatized filmmaking. Standout entries can sway my mind, but typically I fall dead center between enjoying cookie-cutter superhero movies and loathing the industry entirely. This movie finally made me understand what it feels like to be an outsider. With such an exciting audience (every character got large cheers for reasons I don’t honestly know or understand), it felt alienating to watch something everyone else liked and then wonder what was so wrong with me that I couldn’t enjoy myself. The truth is these cheer-worthy moments are more markers of things-to-come or in-jokes that I have literally zero clue or interest in. The passion these people have for seeing some character brought to screen overpowers the desire for any good storytelling whatsoever, mainly because it looks cool to see *checks notes* the old Atom Smasher. I say this as a critique of fandom and the moviemaking universe – it is awful when your audience cheers more for a mid-credits scene than any other moment in the movie itself.
So, I can see this movie earning its weekend hype, but this thing will get chewed up and spit out faster than almost any movie before it. Its action feels hyper-cut and overwrought. Its characters come out supremely underbaked (at the expense of cheap comedy.) Its heroic moments feel undermined entirely. Its star’s charisma dimmed so badly it devalues the entire film. This movie begs us to ask: How much are we willing to take? How much is too much? Whatever the line was, we crossed it long ago, which is what we get. It’s a fairly soulless, barely entertaining refuses-to-engage action flick dumped in October trying to wow superfans and alienate average moviegoers. I would not recommend.
In Theaters Friday, October 21st
