I’ll begin by stating that I am a pretty big DC comics fan and wanted to love this movie. Black Adam is perhaps one of the coolest villains/antiheroes around, in the comics that is. I highly recommend reading “The Power of Shazam”, possibly Black Adam’s best appearance to date. It contains a story that I was hoping this movie would take a lot of inspiration from. I was wrong about that.
What we got instead was a disappointing coulda, woulda, shoulda. There may be a good edit of this flick somewhere on the cutting floor of Black Adam’s production office. Will we ever see it? Probably not. Why would the shareholder committee that created this thing want anything other than a generic PG-13 visual spectacle that appeals to all and pleases none?
There was a rumour going around that Dwayne Johnson wanted to make a rated-R villain origin story, you know… something that we would all actually want to watch. Johnson’s charisma couldn’t save the project, however, and apparently couldn’t convince the Warner Brothers/DC studio execs to make anything other than the pretentious slop that has come to be indicative of the “DC Cinematic Universe”, whatever that is at this point.
Black Adam is plagued by everything I hate about superhero movies these days (which is a lot). A complete overuse of terrible and unfunny dialogue that is trying too hard to be funny and sound like it was written by Joss Whedon, to start. Superhero movies do not have to be funny. I don’t know how many times I’ve just wanted to scream this at the screen. Many of the greatest comics, the ones that have supposedly inspired these movies, contain exactly zero humour, and when they do, it’s sparse and usually in the form of quips by characters who are designated “funny guys”. But like usual, practically every character at some point in this movie feels the need to stand on their pedestal and make the audience laugh, perhaps the quickest way to kill any sort of dramatic tension it was trying to build.
I digress, the antagonist, a demon by the name of Sabaac was boring, underdeveloped, and was in the movie to simply be a punching bag for the heroes at the end. I really can’t elaborate more on him, even if I wanted to. The rest of the movie was mostly filled with more bland and one-dimensional characters played by wooden actors. Don’t get me started about that one child actor. Every scene had me begging for him to not appear on screen, and yet there he was, rolling around on his stupid little skateboard. Watch the movie to see what I mean…or don’t.
What did I like about Black Adam? Well, I did say that maybe there was a good movie somewhere deep in it, very deep. Dwayne Johnson does play the character of Black Adam well. The sort of robotic, terminator-like persona he has in this movie didn’t require a skilled performance. I guess Johnson’s beefy outward appearance did a lot of the talking. He does really look like a superhuman in real life and I guess I commend him on his ongoing efforts to literally be the biggest guy in the room at all times. Pierce Brosnan was perhaps the best part of the movie, standing out with a great (as expected) performance as the mysteriously cool Doctor Fate. I’d very much like to see him reprise this role in another DC film. Aldis Hodge played a faithful rendition of Hawkman, some of the fight sequences and special effects were fun to watch, and seeing a certain actor playing a certain man in a cape at the end gave some hope as to where this franchise is headed in the future. That’s all I have to say about Black Adam. It is a very average action movie, if not slightly disappointing.
Aquaman is still, by far, the best DCU film to date.
