So. Much. Punching
Director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Dwayne Johnson re-team to bring more joylessness to the DCeu.
Black Adam
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra • Writer: Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, Sohrab Noshirvani
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Sarah Shahi, Noah Centineo, Quintessa Swindell, Bodhi Sabongui, Marwan Kenzari, Mohammed Amer, Pierce Brosnan
USA • 2hrs 4mins
Opens Hong Kong October 20 • IIB
Grade: C
If you think for one second that Dwayne Johnson is going to go grey hat, never mind full black hat, in DC’s latest hot mess Black Adam, think again. Johnson’s not going to tarnish his brand (notice how fast he backpedalled on his thumbs up to bullshit conspiracy theories by the likes of Joe Rogen), and Warner isn’t going to mess with their brand by making a halfway decent mainline DC movie (Matt Reeves’ The Batman being the outlier). Black Adam has a lot going for it – an anti-hero, a complex theme about violence being the right thing to do, a stellar cast – but, man. This lumbering, bloated lump is about as exciting as making your own penicillin. The connective tissue to the flailing DCEU here is Shazam, which was surprisingly charming in its facile way, but in trying to go “dark” with a heady theme and casting against type (hahahahaha), Black Adam can’t capture that same lightning in a bottle. Director Jaume Collet-Serra – who’s done frequently effective work on The Shallows and a bunch of Liam Neeson geriactioners – most obviously references his work on the Johnson starrer Jungle Cruise, making this just as leaden and unfunny as that was. Black Adam is trying to light a fire with wet matches.
There’s about to be punching
At the risk of totally confusing and conflating DC and Marvel once again, Black Adam begins 5,000 years ago, in the ancient kingdom of Wakanda Kahndaq, ruled by the despotic king Sabbac (Marwan Kenzari, Jafar in Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin) who wants a glowy blue rock made of powerful mystery material Vibranium Eternium. After years of living in servitude, a lowly worker rises up and challenges the king, who tries to cut off his head and gets his ass handed to him in a fight for it when wizards (including Shazam’s Djimon Hounsou) make a kid called Teth-Adam a hero and turns him into Johnson.
Five millennia later, the vaguely Middle-Eastern/Indian Sub-continental Kahndaq is still in chains, this time ruled by imperial powers, mercenaries and the criminal Intergang (seriously, they’re called Intergang). Fighting the power is teacher (?) and one-woman Resistance Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), her brother Karim (Mohammed Amer), and Ishmael Gregor (Kenzari), who’s actually Intergang’s leader. Very long story short, Adrianna summons Teth-Adam when Ishmael tries to kill her for a crown made from the blue rock, which gets the Justice Society – led by Dr Strange Kent Nelson/Dr Fate (Pierce Brosnan) and Falcon Carter Hall/Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) – involved. Cue 115 minutes of punching.
Punching soon
Getting ready to punch someone
Expending any more energy on the convoluted nonsense of Black Adam’s plot is pointless. This is boardroom filmmaking constructed to tick boxes, with Johnson’s fingerprints all over it. Like most superhero movies of late, it’s too long, too repetitive, too predictable and way, way too safe. But Adam is just kind of dull too. Collet-Serra is a stylist with a strong eye for the Big Setpiece, and a three-way rescue in the third act demonstrates a visual flair the film could have used more of, more consistently. There’s no tension in Adam, largely because the characters are archetypes and we know their fates as soon as they’re introduced. We only care about any of them at the very end in an admittedly great (though protracted) sequence, but it’s too little too late.
It doesn’t help that, charming though he may be, Johnson can’t tap the kind of nuance needed for a role like Teth-Adam, rendering his repeated statement that “I’m not who you think I am” a tease. The supporting cast of young’uns designed to appeal to the 15-25 demo get very little to do. Noah Centineo’s Ant-Man Al Rothstein/Atom Smasher spends most of his time as weak comic relief (though he and Hodge have one of the film’s few good fleeting scenes), or making goo-goo eyes at Storm Maxine Hunkel/Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), whose superpower seems to be slowing down during speed ramping moments to gaze into the middle distance from behind luscious locks. Black Adam isn’t particularly bad. It’s just there. — DEK