The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
The Rock has been talking about making a Black Adam movie since the late 2000s. Given that amount of time for planning, its kind of amazing how uninteresting the final product is. Black Adam is a failure as both a standalone movie and when considered as an adaptation, but its particular flavor of failure is somewhat interesting because it feels more like a bad Marvel movie than it does a bad DC movie. DC movies often take wild swings in terms of tone, occasionally succeeding (like with Joker and The Suicide Squad) and more often failing (like everything that Zack Snyder has touched). Meanwhile, Marvel rarely takes any chances, relying on the same formula and plot beats repeatedly, with varying levels of success. Black Adam feels like the latter, Marvel-branded flavor of crap. Black Adam is about as mundane and forgettable as comic book movies get and would fit quite well beside stuff like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals in leading cinema’s focus group approved death march.
We open in 2600 BC in the fictional middle eastern country of Kahndaq where an evil king has used some sort of magic crown to enslave his people. A slave boy is given the powers of Shazam (yes, that Shazam) to defend his people and kill the king. Flash forward to the present day and some woefully underwritten characters unleash the slave boy, now a very grown up The Rock, in the form of Black Adam. He goes on a rampage and Amanda Waller (from the Suicide Squad movies) calls in the Justice Society (who, like the Justice League, have dropped the “of America” from their name for the movies because god forbid we not appease the Chinese government) to stop him.
The entire rest of the movie is just Black Adam fighting the Justice Society in a series of action scenes that are so repetitive that the film could have restarted and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Even by the standards of modern super hero films, Black Adam’s plot is practically nonexistent and consists almost entirely of actors in front of green screens knocking each other through CGI buildings, eschewing any semblance of character or consequence in favor of laptop-generated destruction effects (its nice to see that DC characters have learned nothing about collateral damage since Man of Steel, as the civilian deaths would be in the millions in this movie). I love action movies as much as the next guy, but there has to be something to them. There has to be stakes and decent characters or at least some some sleaziness. Black Adam has none of that. This is the movie equivalent of watching two kids play with random action figures for two hours. And dumb kids, too.
Prior to release, the filmmakers (and The Rock) promised a violent, brutal anti-hero unlike we have seen in other comic book movies. My ass. There is no genuine menace here and the violence is purely modern PG-13 (meaning that it would be a PG in the 80s and a G in the 70s). This again harkens back to the Marvel comparison, as DC has been willing to make R-rated movies in the past while Marvel has been content with castrating characters like Venom and Carnage with a PG-13. Here, the brutality is largely limited to watching The Rock’s listless performance, as he spends the entire movie sternly staring at people and….actually, that’s about the entire performance. It’s almost impressive for a director to get so little charisma out of this guy.
Besides being generally uninteresting, I’m somewhat befuddled by the treatment of Black Adam as a character. In the comics, he was first introduced in 1945 in The Marvel Family #1. As implied by the name of that comic, he is the main villain of the DC’s Captain Marvel, better known lately as Shazam. This also seems obvious when the movie mentions that his powers are also derived from the wizard Shazam. What isn’t clear is why, then, does the movie never mention the superhero Shazam? Not just that he isn’t in the movie, but nobody even mentions that he exists. Even Amanda Waller doesn’t mention that there is a superhero with literally the exact same powers as this guy available and instead opts to send in the Justice Society. The Rock is also obsessed with the idea of having Black Adam square off with a major hero in a future film and that hero makes a cameo at the end of this movie…..and it isn’t Shazam. I won’t spoil it, but the reveal is a character with absolutely no history with Black Adam. It would be like making a Lex Luthor movie and the big hero reveal at the end is Green Arrow instead of Superman. None of this makes any goddamn sense. I’m convinced that the people in charge of making this movie have never seen another DC movie or read a comic book and are just going by characters that they vaguely recall seeing in a coloring book as a child.
Let’s talk about the Justice Society of America (sorry, just Justice Society; didn’t mean to offend anyone). For the non-comic book nerds, the Justice Society is actually the original superhero team, first appearing in All Star Comics #3 in 1940. The roster has changed a lot over the years, but this movie’s incarnation includes Hawkman and Dr. Fate (who were original members in the comics) along with Cyclone and Atom Smasher (both of whom I’ve barely heard of). For starters, the existence of the team (and the frequent implication that they have been operating for a long time) raises serious continuity questions with the other DC movies. Questions such as: Why has nobody mentioned them before? Why didn’t Batman recruit them to join the Justice League, or even just join the Justice Society rather than starting his own team? Why didn’t they show up to help in any of the major battles in the previous movies? This is what happens when you don’t plan shit but somehow still want everything to be in continuity with each other.
As for the individual members of the team, the film’s saving grace is Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate. Although the character will be unfamiliar to most, the basic gist of the character won’t be because this is another example of DC and Marvel basically having their own versions of the same character (The Atom = Antman, Green Arrow = Hawkeye, Clayface = Sandman, Swamp Thing = Man-Thing, etc.). Here we are introduced to DC’s equivalent of Dr. Strange, but, as familiar as this is, Brosnan does mange to bring a grizzled sense of gravitas to the part that adds much needed weight to the proceedings. In fact, he’s the only person that brings any weight to the film and acts like there are real stakes here.
The rest of the team is decidedly less interesting. Aldis Hodge does what he can with Hawkman despite being saddled with a script that gives him little to do but spout incredibly cliché dialogue about this black-and-white view of the world. There could have also been a funny running gag where Hawkman repeatedly tells Black Adam to surrender even though Adam has repeatedly beaten the shit out of him. Unfortunately, this is the result of poor writing rather than clever writing, so the movie isn’t even in on its own joke. Atom Smasher and Cyclone are the rookies on the team (because this is apparently a good mission to audition rookies) and do little but offer Marvel-like comic relief that is neither wanted nor needed. Oh, and there is the running question of if they will become a couple. Will they? Won’t they? Who gives a shit? I don’t.
Black Adam is a two-hour long continuity error that also provides little entertainment value for those that don’t care about continuity. The characters are bland, the fight scenes are repetitive and the plot is nearly nonexistent. I honestly don’t remember why the characters were all fighting over that crown (it has something to do with demons or the devil or something?) because the movie is barely paying lip service to its own plot. For a dream project that has been in development for 15 years for one of the biggest stars in the world, the most remarkable thing about Black Adam is how unremarkable it is.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Adam_(film)#/media/File:Black_Adam_(film)_poster.jpg
