A superhero movie in which a likely presidential candidate shows how satisfying it is to wield overwhelming force when nobody’s strong enough to challenge you, Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Black Adam will, for most viewers, just be another fine-not-great night of spandex mayhem and franchises hoping to be born. Other moviegoers may have trouble finding escapist pleasure here, given the knotty global issues the movie raises but doesn’t fully process. As depressing as it is to have to parse the carnival of pop culture for hints of tomorrow’s foreign policy (and to imagine threat scenarios involving an entertainer as likable as Dwayne Johnson), that’s the world we live in right now.
Related Stories
So before asking if it’s fun or not, let’s acknowledge: Black Adam is all about the merits of sending American muscle to the world’s hotspots, and it can very easily be read as an argument for isolationism. Almost as easily, it can be interpreted as an indictment of past inaction. From afar, this looks less like a recognition of geopolitical complexity than a desire to please all audiences, honestly or not. Business as usual in both Hollywood and Washington — but vastly more problematic in the latter place.
Black Adam
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Pierce Brosnan, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Bodhi Sabongui, Marwan Kenzari, Quintessa Swindell, Bodhi Sabongui
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Screenwriters: Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, Sohrab Noshirvani
Rated PG-13, 2 hours 5 minutes
Politics be damned, the first thing most comics buffs will notice is that, though we’ve prayed DC would move on, there are more than echoes of the Snyderverse here. In the very first sequence, we get slo-mo and flying globules of blood that could almost be outtakes from 300. Conspicuous slo-mo plagues the film, and rumor-mongers will already know of stronger ties to Zack Snyder’s films.
Identification with the macho side of DC’s mythology might explain why, of the many superpowered costars here, the expected one is absent. The Shazam of David F. Sandberg’s surprisingly charming 2019 film would be welcome, shifting the focus away from revved-up egos and ancient grievances, but no: Don’t expect Zachary Levi’s boy-turned-hero to show up.
We do briefly see the wizard who gave Billy Batson his powers, though. In flashbacks to an ancient Egypt-like kingdom called Kahndaq, a king forces his subjects to toil in mines seeking the magical mineral Eternium. Hoping to start a revolt, a young boy is instead captured. But just as he’s about to be executed, wizards rescue him, transforming him into a godlike champion — who immediately destroys the king and his home in a rage-fueled battle.
Millennia later, a Kahndaq scholar named Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) hunts for the king’s Eternium crown in a forgotten tomb. She finds it, and unwittingly revives the long-dead champion, just as her expedition is ambushed by Intergang, the crew of mercenaries that has terrorized Kahndaq for decades. Violence ensues.
Johnson’s resurrected warrior, Teth Adam, gets most of his briefing on the modern world from Adrianna’s son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui). Mother and son have secretly been working against Intergang, and possessing the magic crown only makes them bigger targets. But Teth Adam cares little about their troubles, and chides the boy for not knowing violence is the answer to such problems.
Others take a greater interest. In America, Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) enlists Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan) and some less famous heroes to go retrieve the crown and lock it up. They zip around the globe in a jet whose detachable cockpit would make any billionaire owner of phallic rockets envious, and proceed to behave (to Adrianna’s eyes, at least) like enforcers of a paternalistic Western power structure.
(The script does little to help non-DC-scholars here, briefly alluding to nanobots and relics and the Justice Society of America as if other movies had introduced them already. With so many new characters in what is basically a two-hour fight scene, there’s no place for much exposition.)
Hodge brings a hardass edge to Hawkman, a law-and-order guy who’s just as stubborn about enforcing the status quo as Teth Adam is about killing anybody who looks at him wrong. The film dramatizes their clashing approaches well while sympathizing with the conflicted people of today’s Kahndaq: They sure wanted the West’s help when they had no treasures to protect; now, Teth Adam’s style holds more appeal.
Johnson creates a magnetic antihero, volatile and antisocial. He doesn’t fly so much as stalk the sky; he swats opponents like the bundles of weightless CG pixels they are. And this passion project serves the character well, setting him up for adventures one hopes will be less predictable than this one.
And maybe, while Teth Adam slowly assembles a coherent moral worldview over the course of many movies, America can grow out of its appalling tendency to elect celebrities with no experience in making governments work. Sadly, that’ll take more than wizards and magic rocks.
Full credits
Production companies: Seven Bucks Productions, Flynn Picture Company
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Pierce Brosnan, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Bodhi Sabongui, Marwan Kenzari, Quintessa Swindell, Bodhi Sabongui
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Screenwriters: Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, Sohrab Noshirvani
Producers: Beau Flynn, Dwayne Johnson, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia
Director of photography: Lawrence Sher
Production designer: Tom Meyer
Costume designer: Kurt and Bart
Editors: John Lee, Michael L. Sale
Composer: Lorne Balfe
Casting director: Rich Delia
Rated PG-13, 2 hours 5 minutes
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day