Black Adam

Review: written Jan 2023

Dark times for DC..

Over the years, Dwayne Johnson has really grown on me – he has an easy going charm that is hard to resist, a likeable screen presence. That just makes it all the sadder to see his talents ignored / wasted in this disappointing DC outing.

After an exposition heavy introduction introducing yet another superhero being formed, bestowed by the Gods millenia ago with superhero powers, we see that superhero then being imprisoned. 5000 years later (now), this has fallen into myth, until he is once again uncovered. Will he be angry and bent on destruction, or can he be persuaded to fight for Justice? Or more accurately, can he be persuaded to fight for the Justice Society – a band of superheroes the scriptwriters seemingly hurriedly put together using discarded ideas from other movies, a mash up of Avengers and X-Men if you will.

And for all the effects (and oh, there are so many..) and action ( and oh, how can so much ‘action’ get so boring..), this is the impression I had of the entire movie – it feels like a bunch of ideas stitched together into something quite incoherent. It never feels like it has its own path – with every idea it has looking like an obvious nod to or competition with other movies. The idea of the Justice Society being a band of hitherto unmentioned superheroes of the DC movie universe, led by Pierce Brosnan’s Doctor Strange – oh sorry, of course I mean Doctor Fate - feels the least earned element . It asks us to care about characters who have been hastily put together from DC’s back catalogue, and expects us to invest in their story and chemistry, when the filmmakers appear to have invested in neither.

Dwayne Johnson has done great things with poor material in the past, by injecting his own brand of personality – but here although you see a few moments of sparkle, it’s way too little to rescue a movie for which I will reserve one of my most damning criticisms – I didn’t care about the fate of anyone in it. I was just bored.