Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Black Adam’ on VOD, a Stupefying DC Universe Outing That Fumbles The Rock

The DC Extended Universe resumed with Black Adam (now on VOD streaming services like Amazon Prime Video) more than a year after James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad wound up being the rare delightful DC excursion, and several months after Matthew Reeves’ stunningly awesome The Batman officially didn’t count because alternate universes exist, you know. Two tough acts to follow, either way. Adam is a spinoff of 2019’s Shazam! and precedes the DCEU stuff under Gunn, who recently became president of such things, so here’s hoping he brings some fresh energy to upcoming Flash, Aquaman, Shazam and Blue Beetle outings (all due next year, assuming they don’t get delayed again). Especially since Black Adam feels so much like the old, wearisome, stultifyingly CGIed DC movies we’ve endured.

BLACK ADAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Once upon a time, shit sucked. Well, shit was good before it sucked: KAHNDAQ, 2600 BCE was the original great and mighty empire, before Rome and all those other empires. The Middle Eastern city prospered until an evil king forged an evil crown with the help of six demons of the ancient world and a very rare mineral called eternium. You keeping up? This bullshit is ESSENTIAL. He enslaved his people and… it goes on, and there’s plenty of voiceover narration. Let’s just say a slave named Teth-Adam was gifted with godlike powers in order to save everyone from the evil jerks, but he was enslaved in a tomb in a structure that still stands in present-day Kahndaq, which is a police state ruled by the Intergang and a place where a hoodied kid on a skateboard radical-dudes his way through town to the tune of an old Smashing Pumpkins hit. For the citizens of Kahndaq, the world is a vampire.

The kid is Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) and his mom is Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) and her brother is Karim (Mohammed Amer), and they’re members of a resistance against the Intergang. Adrianna’s idea is to find the old evil crown and do what with it now? Run around hither and thither with it like it’s a MacGuffin, that’s what. Anyway, Intergang baddies interrupt her foray into the ancient tomb and she utters an incantation punctuated with the word “Shazam!” and kapow, with a mighty burst of CGI and a weird remix of ‘Paint it Black,’ Teth-Adam (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) emerges from the nether to murder the living piss out of the bad guys. He uses his never-fully-defined powers to turn them to ash or skeletonize them or simply throw them over a mountain range with nary a thought or a signature The Rock raised eyebrow. So what does the Shazam! thing have to do with the Shazam! movie from four years ago? Something, but also nothing, because this movie doesn’t get into it.

So, you might ask, Black Adam stands on its own then? Oh, you silly strawpeople, I set you up to knock you down: Of course it doesn’t! Other DC characters MUST get involved in this nonsense, since nobody’s sure if Teth-Adam is a good guy or a bad guy or what. And those characters are the Justice… Society of America. (Sad trombone? Maybe!) They are: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), the leader, a badass with big wings and a goofy helmet; Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan!), a gent with a gold helmet that allows him to do things like see the future and replicate himself; Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who can grow into a giant; and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), controller of mighty winds. And bursting forth from this plot is a surely deep, intricate and layered metaphor about the U.S.’ political meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.

There is a butting of heads as Adrianna insists Teth-Adam is the new hero of Kahndaq, while the JSA folk insist he’s a threat to all of everything. “No more extrajudicial killings!” is something Hawkman likes to bellow. Meanwhile, Amon buddies up with the scowling and humorless Teth-Adam, giving him a catchphrase and stuff like that; maybe the guy’s warming up a little? I think he also has amnesia? I’m sure your brain would be a little cloudy if you’d been entombed for 5,000 years. Anyway, destiny intervenes when the real threat to all of everything shows up, a devilhorned demonic freak named Sabbac who can spurt the flames of heck from the occult sigil carved into his chest. Will Sabbac rule the wasteland or will somebody stop him? NO SHAZSPOILERS!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Black Adam is a teensy fraction better than the bilgiest of DCEU dreck. Asserting that it’s more visually appealing than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Man of Steel is to say that raccoons are cuter filthy disease-ridden vermin than sewer rats.

Performance Worth Watching: Rough sledding all around here. Johnson gets no opportunities to deploy his genial persona; the movie tosses a wet blanket on him. So let’s give this one to Hodge, who manages to give Hawkman some gravitas from behind that ridiculous helm.

Memorable Dialogue: Teth-Adam gives his own movie an overly generous review: “I’m not laughing. That was a smirk.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Who Cares of it all is significant: The Rock’s charisma hemmed in, a parade of bland DC B-leaguers, fizzling comedy, heaping cartloads of questionable CGI and action sequences designed not to thrill but to mercilessly barrage the senses. The boy ends up kidnapped, because what other purpose does such a character in such a movie serve; the villain delivers a bloviating speech when he could be delivering the kill shot; the hero who can move faster than a quark farts chooses not to during the very moment where it would most come in handy; the bad guy has an army of minions that flop over as soon as Central Command goes out, etc. And I say all this assuming that quark farts are very, very fast.

The best scene in Black Adam is one that’s incredibly sobering, with somber conversation and minor-key music, punctuated with one dead-serious utterance of a single word: “Shazam!” This is the film in microcosm: Something that insists on being taken seriously, but is impossible to take seriously.

Somewhere in among the fringes of this overplotted, overpopulated mess is a moral wrestling match in which self-proclaimed heroes who just want to stop a guy from killing – extrajudicially, don’t forget, that’s a key qualifier – are also preventing the oppression of an entire people. It’s a mind-your-own-beeswax plot thread that might carry some real-world implications if anyone involved gave more of a shit about actually writing things instead of jamming in extraneous underdeveloped characters and forcing a square Rock into a round hole. Jaume Collet-Serra (Jungle Cruise, four generic Liam Neeson thrillers) never figures out what to do with his morally ambiguous central character, so he surrounds Black Adam with flurries of junk and hopes we don’t notice. We did, sorry.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Black Adam is one of those movies where you’re convinced the streaming progress bar is defying the laws of physics by making time move slower.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.