"Black Adam": review

[WARNING: spoilers.]

"Black Adam" is a 2022 superhero action film that has been a long time in the making. It stars Dwayne Johnson, who has been a fan of this DC character since forever. Johnson is also listed as one of the film's producers. "Black Adam" is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, and if you're scratching your head as to who that is, well, frankly, so was I until I looked him up: Collet-Serra most famously directed the shark movie "The Shallows," starring Ryan Reynolds's wife Blake Lively. "Black Adam" also stars Aldis Hodge, Pierce Brosnan, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Bodhi Sabongui, Mohammed Amer, Marwan Kenzari, and Quintessa Swindell.

In modern times, a team of archaeologists in the country of Kahndaq is searching for an ancient crown made of a super-dense metal called eternium, a material known to be imbued with magical power. The ancient story is that, over 4500 years ago, a king named Ahk-ton wanted to forge a crown of that metal, so he enslaved most of his kingdom's population and set the slaves to digging. One slave boy, Hurut, took a chunk of eternium from a slave who found it, and with thoughts of rebellion in his head, led the local guards on a merry chase before he was caught.  Right before he was executed, though, a group of wizards who had noticed his purity of heart and his desire to free the slaves gave him the mystical power of Shazam which, as in the movie "Shazam," turned him from a teen into an adult with superpowers—someone called simply the Champion, a being who now had the strength to overthrow the king. The king's fortress eventually crumbled, but the Champion disappeared, as did the crown. Back in modern times, the team discovers where the crown is hidden, but right as they are about to move the crown to a safer place, a platoon of Intergang soldiers arrives, and all hell breaks loose. Arianna (Shahi) tries to escape the Intergang soldiers, but she gets captured. An archaeologist with a knowledge of ancient languages, Arianna desperately invokes the ancient powers described by the hieroglyphs written on the walls of the catacombs she's in. In doing so, she releases Teth-Adam (Johnson), a huge and powerful being of magic who has been trapped under the mountain for nearly 5000 years. Teth-Adam makes short work of the Intergang troops, killing them all, but stopping short of killing Adrianna and her brother Karim (Amer). Although he seems invincible, Teth-Adam is wounded by an eternium-enriched weapon. Adrianna and Karim take Adam back home. In the downtown part of Kahndaq's capital, Adrianna's son Amon (Sabongui) has encounters with Intergang troops, who occupy Kahndaq as a foreign force. Amon seethes with resentment because his nation has been under one foreign boot or another for centuries. Meanwhile, Teth-Adam reawakens in Adrianna's apartment and talks with Amon, who does his best to fill Adam in on modern life. In the United States, the Justice Society of America is alerted to Adam's reawakening, and they head to Kahndaq, worried about the threat to the world that Teth-Adam represents. Meanwhile, someone close to Adrianna and secretly working with Intergang has designs on taking the eternium-crown, called the Crown of Sabbac, for himself. Teth-Adam must find his place in the modern world while dealing with the incoming Justice Society, the occupying force of Intergang, and the secret enemy.

I know nothing about the comic-book character of Black Adam, so all I have to go on is what I saw in the movie. With the hulking Dwayne Johnson in the title role, Teth-Adam—who is addressed as Black Adam only after the credits start rolling—is an imposing figure. The suit for Black Adam was hilariously designed to allow Johnson's monstrous trapezius muscles to bulge out, making his head and neck into something like a pyramid. If I've read the movie correctly, Teth-Adam starts out as a simple human being (the twist ending, which I won't give away here, reveals that his origin was not what we are at first led to believe it was) who is magically gifted the powers of Shazam. So unlike Superman, who is an alien from a faraway world whose cells respond mightily to the light of our yellow sun, Adam's home is Earth, but his first loyalty is to his memory of the Kahndaq from nearly 5000 years ago. The movie portrays Adam as perfectly willing to kill anyone who stands in his way.

Johnson is actually not bad in the title role, which doesn't require Oscar-level acting. No longer a spring chicken (he's 50 as of this year), Johnson has the craggy face that shows the wear and tear of a man who has led a sad existence and awakened to more sadness. In fact, Johnson's acting in scenes where he has no lines to utter is almost—dare I say it—powerful. He's able to project sorrow and anger and rage. Maybe that's a product of Johnson's theatrical pro-wrestling background, or maybe he loves the character of Black Adam so much that he really can just slip into the role. I think it's safe to say that Dwayne Johnson owns the character; I can no longer imagine anyone else in that role.

I enjoyed the fact that the story went all-in with the idea of Black Adam as an antihero who doesn't hesitate to kill. And while the movie shows a disturbing amount of property damage that presumably brings with it great loss of innocent life, I see that loss of life as the inevitable consequence when great powers contend with each other. Heroes (and antiheroes) can't all take the Superman or Spider-Man route and try to save all life, all the time. The omelet requires some broken eggs. Can't be helped. The movie faces that issue head-on and doesn't flinch from showing the damage.

Black Adam is supposed to be roughly equivalent to Superman in power level, so I can imagine there must have been a real temptation to depict him fighting like Superman. For the most part, the filmmakers avoid this; Black Adam has his own weirdly distinct fighting style, and even the way he flies around Kahndaq's capital city has a very un-Superman-like feel to it. I appreciated all of that. Adam is also gifted with Palpatine-like lightning abilities, allowing him to kill from a distance.

Another of the movie's positives is the way it allows the members of the Justice Society of America to interact with each other. The two older members of the team are Hawkman/Carter Hall (Hodge), and Dr. Fate/Kent Nelson (Brosnan). Hawkman seems to have a degree of super-strength, along with some sort of nanotech wingsuit, helmet, and mace (all made from something called Nth metal, which is in theory indestructible). Despite these assets, he's not a real match for Adam. Dr. Fate is blessed or cursed with the ability to see and interpret visions of the future. He seems to see possible futures, although some of his visions are more persistent than others. The term "fate" gets bandied about whenever he's in the room, but he also seems open to the idea that fates can be changed. He wears an alien helmet that apparently chooses the wearer—think: Dr. Strange's cape—and that seems to enhance his ability to see into the future. Like Marvel's Dr. Strange, DC's Dr. Fate is also a magic-user, and a compassionate one, at that. He has none of the arrogance of Dr. Strange, and the movie plays up the strong, if contentious, friendship he has with Hawkman. I thought the bond between these two characters was well written, but I'd have liked to see even more of it. The two younger members of the Justice Society are Cyclone/Maxine Hunkel (Swindell) and Atom Smasher/Al Rothstein (Centineo). They meet each other for the first time during the story, and a sort of flirty bond develops between them, although it's obvious that Atom Smasher, whose superpower is the ability to grow huge, is the goofier of the two. Cyclone, meanwhile, can manipulate air à la Marvel's Storm from the X-Men, although when Cyclone does her thing, strangely billowing rainbows appear. The movie is smart enough to show that, because this team of four has come together like this for the first time, they don't operate that smoothly, and the resultant property damage in Kahndaq is horrific.

While the film had plenty of positives, it also had its share of negatives. The story did a good job of making Black Adam quite unlike Superman, but it was hard pressed to differentiate Dr. Fate from Dr. Strange. There's a scene in the third reel in which Dr. Fate fights the movie's main villain, who has undergone a transformation from human to demon, and the fight plays out a little too much like the heroes' fight against Thanos in "Avengers: Infinity War," with Dr. Fate even multiplying himself the way Dr. Strange did. (I see that a lot of online speculation has been brewing about who would win a Strange-versus-Fate sorcerer fight, with many sources confidently claiming that Fate would win.) A common complaint among many critics has been that the film ends with the usual CGI-heavy fight against an enemy who, being entirely CGI, is impossible to take seriously. I don't know about that: Thanos was entirely CGI, but because his character had been so well developed by the time of that first many-against-one fight on Thanos's homeworld, viewers were invested, CGI or not. True: the demonic villain at the end of "Black Adam" has nothing on Thanos in terms of character development, so maybe that's why the CGI is put forth as a complaint. A lot more could have been done to make this an even darker movie. I think the filmmakers should have gone for the hard R rating: more blood and gore, more cruel acts by the villain to cement our hatred of him (as it is, he comes off as someone with the typical supervillain's lust for power and domination—ho-hum), more dark acts by Black Adam to reinforce his antihero status. The movie also becomes a bit muddled as to what modern Kahndaq's problem is: is it the occupation by Intergang (a stand-in for oppressive Western occupiers), or is it the hellish army of the dead that briefly appears at the end of the film? The movie is brave enough to present some meaty themes that would have been cool to explore: the idea of Black Adam as a merely regional hero, not a hero who wants to protect the whole earth; the question of Western occupation in the Middle East; the idea of a so-called "hero's" moral worth (one of the main characters rages at the Justice Society for never once making an appearance in Kahndaq despite decades of Intergang occupation); the ethical question of letting villains live when you know they'll merely go back to their destructive ways, and so on. Plenty of big ideas put forth, but none probed deeply. The movie had the chance to go profound both philosophically and emotionally, and it failed to do either. I was also a bit confused by the Kahndaqis' constant use of English despite the fact that, when we see flashbacks to ancient Kahndaq, everyone is speaking a foreign language. Why did that change in modern times? One last criticism: we went most of the movie without seeing a single sky beam, and I was ready to breathe a sigh of relief, but in the scene where the demonic villain finally sits on the ancient throne, which is still preserved in modern Kahndaq, a sky beam appears and lights up the clouds. Jesus Christ.

So while there was plenty to enjoy about "Black Adam," which doesn't deserve the drubbing it's getting from critics, there were some major problems, too. This is a good, dumb, enjoyable film that hints at something even greater. In terms of the political reality of the film—the diverse, mostly non-white cast and all the rest—I couldn't care less. The casting choices all made sense given that the story is mostly set in a fictional Middle Eastern country. Does it matter that Hawkman, in the movie, is black? Not to me. I'm not invested in the comic-book version(s) of the character, so Hawkman's race didn't matter to me. Apparently, in the comics, Hawkman is also something of a mystical being who has gone through many reincarnations and retained the memories of his past lives (thus giving him vast knowledge and myriad abilities with weapons and languages), so why couldn't he be black in this incarnation? There's nothing in the movie approaching a "Rings of Power"-level disrespect for previous canon here. Aldis Hodge also does a fine job of portraying Hawkman, so how could anyone resent that? That reminds me: Black Adam is released from his 5000-year imprisonment and already speaks English... how? I guess the answer should be obvious: magic. I wish the movie had taken more time to explore the whole "fish out of water" aspect of Adam's reappearance in a world that has long forgotten him. The language nerd in me would have liked to see Adam trying to talk with the locals in ancient Kahndaqi, only to discover how much the language has evolved over millennia.

Watch "Black Adam" with my blessing, knowing it's a flawed work that you shouldn't think too deeply about. Would I watch it again? Yes. Do I anticipate a sequel? Well, the mid-credits scene at the end teases the return of Henry Cavill's Superman (who cryptically tells Black Adam, "We need to talk"), so yes, I anticipate a sequel. And since Black Adam has much the same power set as Billy Batson from "Shazam," I expect that Batson and Adam will also run into each other at some point, perhaps in a third movie. Also: know that "Black Adam" is a mostly serious film, but it's peppered with plenty of humor. I laughed out loud at Adam's inability to walk through doors: he simply walks straight through walls with no regard for a building's structural integrity. Adam also learns about how to deliver catchphrases: as young Amon tells him, use the catchphrase before you kill your enemy: "Tell them [i.e., the powers of hell] the Man in Black sent you." Adam has to kill several enemies before he finally gets it right. And in a scene where Hawkman fights Adam while they're inside Adrianna's apartment, the fight moves into Amon's room, with its posters of Justice League heroes, and we watch as, one by one, images of Superman, Batman, and Aquaman all get destroyed as Hawkman and Adam duke it out. For all its flaws, "Black Adam" has its moments. I did not come away a hater, and I hope the movie does well on home video.