Black Adam is an empty tiresome noisy descent into pop pow ker splat superherodom. It’s DC once again trying to jump the line and be Marvel by introducing yet another bunch of heroes and not bothering to flesh them out in advance. Which means all the punching and fighting is just a constant stream of noise.
The film stars Dwayne Johnson as an ancient super being woken up in the modern world. He’s faced with a fictional city occupied by an army of mercenaries… not that he cares much about that because Black Adam is not a good guy. The Justice Society (made up of four B and C tier heroes we’ve never met before) are sent to take care of him…. meanwhile a random child is kidnapped and we all have to care about that plot even though there’s doesn’t seem to be any motivation for the characters to care.
This movie certainly looks great. They put the money on screen, once again, so credit to them. The camera work is fine though highly derivative of Zack Snyder (who is not the director). So… lots of slow-mo shots of allegedly epic or iconic moments.
But here’s the thing… the movie tries real hard at those epic and iconic moments but it never earns them. Who are these characters in these epic shots? I don’t know… I guess they are iconic and important since they are in slo-mo.
If you are a DC comics superfan, maybe all this is the most badass stuff you’ve ever seen… but to the rest of us? OK, I recognize Hawkman from past DC cartoons… and there’s this other guy like Dr. Strange and a guy like Ant Man, and a girl with, like, one of Storm’s powers, I guess. It’s not fair to compare DC characters to Marvel characters because they are both “borrowing” each other’s power sets… but when this movie doesn’t really give us characters or motivations, what are we supposed to do?
Black Adam is a huge problem in his own movie. Who is he? Is he really a bad guy? Of course not, The Rock is playing him. But now you have to explain why he thinks he’s not a hero without giving him a character in the first place. So we just wind up with a dark hearted guy who wants to kill people… but we’re led to believe he’ll be a hero someday. I guess.
Black Adam has no actual goals through most of the movie. He doesn’t care about the city or the mercenaries… he barely cares about this Justice Society coming to pick a fight with him. So these four heroes are technically the good guys fighting against the guy whose movie we’re watching who is kind of the bad guy. Meanwhile there are mercenary bad guys running around kidnapping a child who seems to be far more important to the plot than he’s earned. AND THEN they toss in a big CGI fight with a brand new out-of-nowhere bad guy in the final act. And then ask us to care for the sacrifices of some of these barely inked characters.
This movie is dull mess because it doesn’t do anything to earn its character moments, motivations, or actions. It’s all one big game of leap frog, jumping to the front of the line with limited character setup but with all the noise and clamor. What a tiresome movie.
Score: 68