Review Black Adam - 2022
Black Adam hurtles forward with a glowering Dwayne Johnson as the hero who "isn't a hero" (and the characters himself tells us) but all the same has to fill in that role when the chips are down. Most of the story takes place in the perpetually oppressed country of Kahndaq (which in the course of this tale gets beaten up pretty badly, like Tokyo at the mercy of Godzilla) and then the Justice Society arrives—Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Atom Smasher, and Cyclone—and a series of contretemps follows, not only between Black Adam and this distinctly American team operating in a foreign land, but also within the team itself.
Humour is dished up more often than a needed sense of pathos, which is too bad because the cast seems game for it and that would've balanced things better, not just in representing the team and what happens to them, but in reinforcing the character of Black Adam himself.
Not enough time is spent explaining the Justice Society. They arrive with a fully formed history behind them, but the film simply doesn’t share that background sufficiently with the audience, instead hinting at it. The movie tries to focus on Black Adam and build the complexity of a fully developed character, but that effort never fully comes together. The need to rush toward beating the villains becomes too important too quickly, and as the cast expands, there just isn’t enough room, even with a 2-hour, 4-minute runtime, to let us get to know these people well. For example, Pierce Brosnan (as Dr. Fate) isn’t utilized enough as an actor, nor is he given the dialogue needed to impact the film but for tidbits of funny lines. He appears on screen, but his scenes move by too fast, leaving you to wonder who assembled this plot without giving the cast enough showcase moments to make their characters feel more “real” to the audience.
Perhaps a cleverly written sequel can fix all this, which is my charitable view of the story craftsmanship problems in Black Adam that need polishing*. Like the first Suicide Squad movie (a superior film), it also had garbled storytelling, Black Adam is all the same a likeable movie. Simply put, the film makes it easy to complain about too much extraneous CGI action (there's a lot!) cutting into too little of story with characters we'd like to have around more. Particularly a more coherant story involving the Justice Society.
Wizards and gods
There is an interesting aspect of the film which flows directly out of the original comic book series premise. When Black Adam sees the superheroes of the Justice Society in operation in this film, he declares them to be wizards, something he is familiar by sort've time-traveling from an ancient era where the people were in relationship to the Egyptian gods and the occult powers of that culture. In a way this film, and the Shazam movie from 2018, do something many superhero movies shy away from, which is pinpointing a source for where a super-power is coming from, in this case ancient pre-Christian dieties.
But at the same time, Kahndaq is portrayed as looking like a Muslim-majority country, and yet when we look out over the skyline there’s not a single minaret in sight—something that would have been a minimal nod to 21st century reality. Much like the corporate-owned “Force” of the Star Wars films, Hollywood has embraced comic-book superheroes, and while it can present the technological and pharmaceutical abilities of characters like Captain America, Iron Man, and Batman as forms of “real” power recognizable to a modern audience, here it has also leaned heavily on ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods as explanations for other superpowers. Whether this is because those ancient myths are conveniently in the public domain, or because Hollywood simply enjoys the mysterious ambiguity and capriciousness of these old devils, is another question entirely.
Black Adam doesn't delve too deeply into this at all. Black Adam doesn't explain why superheroes can fly when anointed to do so by a league of wizards (and that's what the Shazam stories have as a front office for distribution of powers) and whether that means the ancient deities are kaput but their powers were obtained by this wizardry council in some bizarre fire-sale so they could use it for battling evil, I don't know.
Dwayne Johnson scowls a lot and this helps the character be what he is in this film: a kind of disgruntled spoiler with a guilty conscious (and why he feels that way is properly explained in the movie, something where the filmmakers did a fine job) but who is, whether from whim or some sense of moral obligation, is neither the villain nor a paragon of virtue, doesn't really get too much exploration. In the latter case, Henry Cavill shows up in a very brief story denouement and this sets up what are the presumed first steps for a franchise of sequels (and also creates a clearcut visual in which Black Adam may be heroic and do good guy stuff, but up against DC's exemplar of absolute goodness - Superman - Black Adam would still have some credibility as a bad guy, at least by comparison).
FOOTNOTE:
*The Box Office for Black Adam peaked at $389,642,000 worldwide as of Dec 17, 2022, making a sequel very unlikely.
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