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Black Adam Review: A Superhero Movie, But Worse
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BLACK ADAM REVIEW: A SUPERHERO MOVIE, BUT WORSE

New Line Cinema
By Witney SeiboldUpdated: Oct. 23, 2022 3:16 pm EST

It is perhaps telling that Dwayne Johnson, star of Jaume Collet-Serra's new
superhero film "Black Adam," has recently appeared in the press announcing that
his film will feature a notable post-credits cameo. These sorts of cameos,
hints, and miniature previews have, over the course of the last decade, become
the lifeblood of superhero movies, forcing audiences to look always forward to
the next chapter rather than dwell on the present. Each film served almost
exclusively as a preview for the next. Back in 2015, the late film critic James
Rocchi called this phenomenon the Marvel Industrial Complex, pointing out how
the genre had, as early as seven years ago, already foregone conventional
storytelling in favor of anticipation-based corporate architecture. 



"Black Adam," true to this ethos, feels more like a hastily speed-read footnote
than a feature. It's a jumbled mess of a movie that grabs great fistfuls of
all-too-familiar blockbuster beats and throws them into a whirling, noisy
centrifuge, hoping something cogent separates out. "Black Adam" features an
extended prologue set in the ancient world, a battle with the wizards from
"Shazam!," an unexplained high-tech super military force, and the hurried
introduction of a quartet of established DC superheroes, previously unseen on
film. "Black Adam" also features that most insufferable of clichés, the hip
tweener who dictates the "rules" of modern superherodom to the title character
(sample dialogue: "You gotta have a catchphrase!"). There was a time when
acknowledging the superficial trappings of comic book heroes right to their
faces might have felt subversive or novel. 2022 is long past that time.




A HERO FROM PRE-BABYLONIAN TIMES

New Line Cinema

"Black Adam" begins in the ancient fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kahndaq,
the only known site of a magical ore called Enternium. Slaves have been forced
to dig nuggets of Eternium out of the ground to build a magic crown for the
king. The actual power or function of Eternium is about as well-explained as the
vague and valuable Unobtanium from James Cameron's "Avatar." Given their silly
names, the ore could very well have been called McGuffinium. When a slave child
rebels against his overseer and is about to be executed for his crime, he is
suddenly whisked away to another dimension by the wizards from "Shazam!" and
given Shazam powers. Legend holds that the now-enhanced wizard champion,
Teth-Adam, destroyed the ancient temple in retribution. 



DC Comics have always brushed up a little bit more closely to the Divine than
their modern, New York-dwelling Marvel counterparts (even when Marvel is dealing
with literal gods), and the pre-Babylonian origins of Black Adam lend the
character a distant whiff of the mythic so sorely lacking from most
larger-than-life superbeings. 

Sadly, any mythic qualities the character has are drowned out by buckets of
sloppy mayhem. Fast forward to modern-day Kahndaq, and it is now occupied by a
gang-like military force that has — without explanation — access to phasers and
flying motorcycles. DC fans might thrill in hearing this is a group called
Intergang, although that name has no meaning in the context of this film. There
is no mention of a dictator, and the members of Intergang seem to have accents
from all over the world. It's a multi-culti occupying force.




THE NEW/OLD (?) JUSTICE SOCIETY

New Line Cinema

Sarah Shahi plays Adrianna Tomaz, a freedom fighter and freelance archeologist
who will have the wherewithal to resurrect Teth-Adam, now played by Dwayne
Johnson, in the modern day. Teth-Adam's first action will be laying waste to an
invading military force. One might say that Teth-Adam's murderous approach to
superherodom is novel, but after the wonton destruction witnessed in 2013's "Man
of Steel," or Iron Man's wholesale battlefield slaughter in "Avengers: Endgame,"
it seems all bets have been off for a while. Tomaz will eventually take
Teth-Adam back to her apartment where her superhero-enthusiast son Amon (Bodhi
Sabongui) will immediately and intolerably dictate to him the rules of being a
superhero in this universe. 



The posters and comic books that festoon Amon's room will be pointedly trashed
during a fight scene later in the film. It's awfully presumptuous of the
filmmakers to assume that Black Adam is important enough to symbolically destroy
Superman, Batman, and The Flash.

Teth-Adam's appearance also inspires the involvement of Suicide Squad
assembler Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) who will quickly construct a team of
superheroes to fight him. The new characters include Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), who
wears a high-tech pair of wings, Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan), a wizard with an
extraterrestrial helmet that can predict the future, Atom Smasher (Noah
Centineo), who can grow to enormous sizes, and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), who
can fly on gusts of rainbow-colored wind. The filmmakers provide these
characters with no origin, which is a small relief, although it may be difficult
to glean just how well-established the Justice Society has been in this
universe. 



Mayhem — and just mayhem — ensues.


THE OUTLINE OF A SUPERHERO MOVIE

New Line Cinema

There is not a single quiet moment of meaning or introspection in "Black Adam."
There is no thought or recognizable humanity. There is not a moment that doesn't
have Lorne Balfe's musical score blaring underneath. Jokes are delivered with
such haste, it might take a moment to acknowledge those moments were meant to be
funny. The filmmakers know that certain fights and confrontations and villains
and McGuffins needed to be included, but fail to effectively establish mood or
stakes. The editing is so quick and perfunctory, "Black Adam" emerges feeling
like an outline rather than a finished movie. There is no wit, no thrill, and no
slickness to the action. "Black Adam" reeks of studio tinkering and endless
recuts. Even visually, the film is unclear and undynamic with action often
obscured by clouds of dust or Dr. Fate's shimmering CGI geometric crystal
shards. 



"Black Adam" even fails as a builder of its own universe. If we now live in a
world where superheroes require no origin stories and entire teams can be
introduced on the fly, what function does the origin story movie have? Setups
for a vast comic book cinematic universe, it seems, aren't as urgently required
as they were back in the days of 2011 when Thor and Captain America were slowly
revealed to the public in their own solo feature films. 

If the entire function of "Black Adam" is to set up a fight between Adam and
Superman, as Johnson has said in public, perhaps skip a "Black Adam" movie and
make only a 50-minute-long fight sequence. "Black Adam" is so hard to watch, it
might make us want to skip the pretense that these are meant to be real movies. 



/Film Rating: 3.5 out of 10

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