Black Adam (2022)

Black Adam is a bit much, even as far as these brobdinagian CG-heavy superhero movies go.  With only fleeting bits of charm from star Dwayne Johnson, this is yet another over-produced bulk that reaffirms the timidity of current studio-driven product.  It’s expensive, with lots of light and color and sound, but at its center it tells an overblown story this is not hard to follow but is, alas, really hard to care about.

I got irritated with this movie right out of the gate because it opens with one of those hefty backstories about an evil king, an enslaved people, a mystical do-dad (in this case, an ugly crown), a heroic diamond in the rough and a 5,000 year gap in which a modern day archologist brings all of these people back to life.  Thanks for nothing. 

The king had been looking for a substance called Eternium and that’s how the ugly crown came to be.  The diamond in the rough led a revolt that ultimately gave him superpowers bound up in the word “shazam” which killed the king and destroyed the city.

Current day.  The Archaeologist (Sarah Shahi) and her teenaged son (Bodhi Sabongui) are looking for the crown, which they hope will help them with their resistance against a group of foreign invaders called the Intergang (white men with Kevlar and machine guns) who squash their culture and rule them like prison guards.  Naturally, they need a hero like Black Adam.  He shows up and the Intergang proves to be like buzzing flies to the muscular hero.  And that’s part of the problem.  Black Adam is apparently invulnerable.  Machine guns, rockets, bullets and bombs are nothing to him,

Anyway, B.A. is eyed with suspicion by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), a government agent who sends the Justice Society to deal with him.   They included Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) who can see the future, Cyclone (Quintessa Swindoll) who can create windstorms and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) who can increase in size.  Atom Smasher’s uncle was the original Atom Smasher and is played in this movie all-too-briefly by Henry Winkler – one of the very few brief pleasures in his movie.

There’s a lot of story here.  A LOT of story here.  Too many narratives, too much narration, too many characters and so little interest.  Worse, it then tries to find a moral ground.  Black Adam is seething with anger over what happened to his beloved Kahndaq and seeks to kill all involved.  The Justice Society wants to reason with him and get him to understand that the world of the 21^st century bows to due process.  This apparently disregards the three-dozen people killed in this movie for comedic effect.

All of this is told in a movie that is ungainly to the naked eye.  This is a movie made with a very expensive technical polish, but no sense of what the audience will be asked to watch.  The camera never stops moving.  The action scenes are incoherent.  The soundtrack plays heavy under every single scene.  The actions scenes are pointless since Black Adam can never get hurt.  And the story is so dense and yet so pointless that you lose all attempts to really even follow it.

Again, Disney and Marvel do this so much better.  Maybe it’s because they’ve earned it.  Their product is based on characters, stories, interpersonal relationships.  Even when they return with an inferior product, you can at least feel the effort.  I don’t know what to think here.  There are enough characters to fill five movies and enough stories to fill two seasons of a streaming show.  Maybe that’s where this movie should have gone.