[Rating: Rock Fist Way Down]
Only in theaters.
The Rock is a virus in Hollywood, spreading throughout the film and TV world, trying to take over as many franchises and IPs as possible. And right now, he’s winning.
Now, lucky us, he’s wormed his way into the DC comic book universe because of course he has. Being touted as a 15-year passion project (yes, seriously), Black Adam is a big, dumb, loud ego trip masquerading as bold, new comic book adventure that will forever change the DC landscape.
That’s movie marketing lingo to disguise the truth: that this is one of the most emotionally uninteresting and generic superhero movies ever produced marketed as a “game changer” so they can convince you to see this anyway because The Rock is one of the biggest movie stars in the world for some reason.
I’ve tried to think of how to explain the plot without giving anything away, but there really isn’t really a …”story.” I won’t bother with characters, because there are none, only caricatures. Nobody has any personalities in this movie. There is stuff that’s happening, mostly crashing and punching and shooting and exploding. But in between those head-numbing montages of violence and chaos and bad writing, some archaeologists are looking for something called the Crown of Sabbac, which they think can help liberate the fictional country of Kahndaq from the evil dictators that have ruled the country. But also some of them hope it will turn them into a demon monster god-thing. When the shit hits the fan, one of them inadvertently releases Teth-Adam (The Rock!) from his 5,000-year old prison and he’s angry because he’s in prison and he has a lot of pent-up rage, so he just wants to fight and kill. And he’s got powers from those Shazam god dudes so that’s what he does. He just kills and melts and crushes everyone in his path for almost no reason most of the time.
This goes on for pretty much the whole movie: everyone tries to kill Black Adam before he kills them. And just to make sure we like him, there is a kid who rejoices that Kahndaq finally has a hero and then takes a side gig as his cheerleader and teaches him things like the importance of timing when delivering a catchphrase while killing someone. But he likes Black Adam, so we should too. I guess?
The film is as hard to watch as it is to follow. If you like your movies visually oversaturated with filters and flooded with slow motion action glamour shots — think 300 but less artistic, then you’re going to love what director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, House of Wax) has in store because they’ve got the old Zack Snyder cinematography down. It’s gross actually. It looks awful. The action would be more fun if the audience was able to get swept up in the intensity of the culmination of dramatic tension being unleashed but instead we have to wait for The Rock to pose for the camera every five minutes like he’s taking promo selfies when he’s taking 500 bullets to the chest or rips a dude in half. Cool guys don’t look at explosions, that sort of deal. Seriously, it’s like Warner Bros. plugged The Rock into a Jib Jab program to show him what he’d look like as a superhero.
Through a seemingly forced cameo by Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, the “movie” introduces the Justice Society of America to track down and stop Black Adam. And despite the fact they all get quite a bit of screen time, they are either completely wasted or underused or just as confused about why they are there and what is going on. Led by Hawk Man (Aldis Hodge) and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan, who looks as bored as we are), the JSA fights against and with Black Adam, trying to teach him mercy if he’s going to be a hero. All they really do is teach him sarcasm, which paves the way for The Rock to mumble one-liners and catch phrases. Actually, I feel like the “script” for this movie, “written” by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani is just pages of trailer dialogue and pictures of explosions. Most of the time everyone is just standing around saying superhero dialogue about what it means to be a superhero while superhero music plays gently behind them.
The other members of the group have even less to do: Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone and Noah Centineo as Atom Smasher would have been better saved for a Justice Society movie so we could learn about their characters because they all do seem genuinely cool. As it is, it just seems like they’re all thrown in there because Black Adam isn’t nearly an interesting enough character to carry his own movie. Which is 100 percent true.
This should have been better off as the Shazam sequel — it literally would have been the same. But clearly The Rock needed a solo movie for his ego. Or, better yet, I’d rather watch a movie where a catastrophe hits Earth and we find out The Rock actually IS a super hero, blending in on our planet as one of the most popular entertainment icons of our generation. And then you give him a suit so he can show off the long hours in the gym and he can ad lib one liners and the movie can make 500 million dollars and we could have avoided him trying to pretend he can blend into a world with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman. Unfortunately he just doesn’t fit in this universe. The Rock already IS a character.
Black Adam is one of DC’s worst movies since they seemed to be turning the corner after the 2016’s disastrous Justice League and the first Suicide Squad. It’s a big, dumb, loud and obnoxiously generic comic book movie that takes a character that would have been better off squaring up with Shazam, but because they cast The Rock, they felt obligated to give him his own movie. There’s just not enough “personality” in this character to make him interesting for 2 hours and the stunt casting cheapens the character’s big-screen debut because it just feels like The Rock is in cosplay because he wants to be in a movie with Superman.
P.S. There is a mid-credits scene that either sets up a dumb sequel or burns off the last movie on Henry Cavill’s contract. We don’t need a movie where The Rock fights Superman, do we?
Lover of movies and tacos. Ad man. Author. Member of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Founder of the Terror on the Plains Horror Festival. Creator and voice of the Reel Hooligans podcast.
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