It sure does seem like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s turn as the DC Comics antihero Black Adam was a long time coming. There have been so many DC-based movies that have come and gone, sometimes with names attached to make the movie at some point. Heck, there was a whole Batgirl movie that was mostly finished that got scrapped. But somehow, Black Adam was always on the schedule. I mean, I get it. Johnson is a box office draw, and he already has a superhero physique. It’s a wonder he hadn’t appeared in one of these movies already, honestly.
Anyway, it’s out now.
The ancient nation of Kanhdaq was once ruled by a brutal king that forced his people to mine a rare element that, once grafted into a crown, could give the king demonic power. Kanhdaq is, apparently, the one place on Earth where the mysterious metal Eternium can be mined to do magical stuff. A champion arose from the ranks for king’s slaves and took the king and his whole palace down in one shot, and that was that. Today, Kanhdaq is a nation that has been held by one invader after another, currently under the thumb of Intergang. Intergang is looking for that lost crown, and when scholar Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) figures out where it is, she heads out there and finds not only the crown, but also the long lost Teth Adam (Johnson), a man of great power and perhaps the legendary champion of Kanhdaq.
As it is, Teth Adam’s way of doing things is a bit on the lethal side. So, while the leaders of Intergang hunt for the crown, the Justice Society, a superhero team dedicated to global security, come to Kanhdaq to take the belligerent Teth Adam into custody. Led by Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), the team consists of older mystic Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan), human whirlwind Cyclone (Quintesse Swindell), and clumsy rookie Atom-Smasher (Noah Centineo), and they aren’t too happy about the prospects of Intergang’s getting the crown either, but they disagree sharply with how Teth Adam does what he does. Can the groups come to a compromise and find a way to save Kanhsaq and perhaps the rest of the world? Because that crown will bring a lot of problems to a lot of people the world over.
I have to say that, frankly, I don’t think I have seen a movie that is this average before. It’s a movie where on the one hand, there isn’t anything overtly wrong with it. But on the other hand, there isn’t really anything right about it either. Johnson makes for a genial performer most of the time, and for the life of me, I can’t remember any time he wasn’t playing someone who was basically a nice guy, the closest being his role in that Jungle Cruise movie, and even then, he was in the act of being redeemed for past misdeeds. Can he be a good antihero? I suppose. As for the rest of the cast, the villain was obviously the villain even before he was revealed as such. Hodge is a good actor given nothing with the script. If anyone does OK, it’s Brosnan, taking a so-so written role and giving it a little bit of gusto, coming across as if his James Bond was now an older wizard. Meanwhile, Centineo is supposed to be the comic relief, but nothing he says or does is all that funny, and Swindell is just there to look colorful as she swirls around the screen. Oh, and then there’s the non-superhero characters who fill plot roles and that’s about it.
That can more or less describe the whole movie. It felt to me like the script was basically working off the first draft. The action starts off almost as soon as the movie starts and never really lets up, but there weren’t really any surprises here. Heck, I think something intended to be a plot twist was given away by the trailers. Much of what I saw or heard here I thought was put in as a placeholder until the writers could think of a cooler or deeper thing to put in instead, but they never quite got around to it. I would go so far as to say there’s some potential to the Black Adam character and concept, but a movie that seems to be made up entirely of cliches that is trying to just coast off the charms of the cast, well…it just isn’t it. Black Adam isn’t a bad movie, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a good one.
Grade: C
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