Black Adam

 Kanhdaq's had it rough. Four thousand years ago an evil king looking for an evil MacGuffin brutally enslaved its people until a superhero rose up to throw him down. This superhero (the first incarnation of Shazam, apparently?) was never seen again, and the country fell into turmoil, taken over by outsiders for much of its history. 

 These days the country is occupied by the Intergang, which seems to be some mixture of a mafia and a PMC (complete with South African accents). And they're after the evil MacGuffin, too. A plucky adventuring archeologist (Sarah Shani) manages to recover it to try to keep it out of Intercorp's hands, but when they move to forcefully retrieve it she unwittingly unleashes the ancient superhero protector of Khandaq, Teth Adam.

 Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson), looking cool with a ratty cape and The Rock's distinctive glowering gaze, proceeds to lay waste to a small battalion of mixed units. But it's different from the carnage in any other superhero movie because, you see, Adam's an Antihero. It's like a hero, but cooler, because he can kill people in any brutal style a PG13 rating will allow.

 Yes, we're back in Superheroland, where critical thinking is stuck at a twelve-year-old level.

Cool guys don't look at explosions. They also murder willy-nilly.

 Anyhow, I can enjoy that sort of thing, as long as the movie is upfront about it, which... this one is. The action is pretty fun - many, many explosions and deaths, some basic gallows humor, and lots of slow motion justified because, similar to Superman, Adam operates at a much quicker speed than humans can. It's marred by that weightless CGI feel when vehicles are thrown around, but at this point in time I guess we got to roll with it until the tech gets better.

 What is not acceptable is that they try to make it iconic by completely mangling the Stone's Paint it Black. Come on, dudes, that song will always be better than anything you ever do; if you're going to ride on its coattails, at least don't butcher it.

 After murderizing dozens of people Adam is wounded by a kryptonite-like missile and falls unconscious. He's rescued by the same archeologist that awoke him, and she decides to take the unconscious Adam and the evil MacGuffin back to her department.
 When he wakes up Adam gets a bit of a history lesson, bonds with the archeologist's obnoxious, superhero-obsessed (of course) teen son, and refuses the hero's call for the first of many, many, many times during the movie.

 And here we get a slight complication. The world at large - well, Suicide Squad's Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is concerned about this new metahuman running amok, so she sends in the Justice Society to neutralize and contain him: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan, by far the best thing in the movie), plus a couple other minor superheroes that don't make much of an impression.

 Because Hawkman, the expedition leader, is portrayed as an arrogant, pig-headed idiot (I honestly thought this side of things was kinda well done; much better than the idiocy they had to cook up to get Batman and Superman to fight each other, at least), you could say things start off with the wrong foot. And so begin an endless series of fights and confrontations in different configurations between the three groups involved: Adam vs JSA, JSA and Adam Vs Intertec, etc, with the evil MacGuffin lurking off in the wings to provide a final battle.

 At the same time Adam's past will be fed to us piecemeal in an unsuccessful attempt to give his character some depth. Will he finally pick up The Hero's calls? Well, yes, dummy. Of course he will. What did you think you were watching?

 Like so many of these movies, the script's main motivation is to string action sequences together. We get almost zero background for any of the superheroes except Adam, which to be perfectly honest was a bit of a relief, and the movie's themes are treated as an afterthought.

 Everything's very adolescent and extremely shallow. The big act of rebellion that gets the king in ancient Kahndaq all hot and bothered? It's getting a bunch of guards run around and making a hand gesture from a high place. Posturing, it's all posturing, which kinda looks bad when later on it becomes obvious it's referencing the Arab Spring.

 The movie also flirts with taking a stand against imperialism; we know this because the obnoxious kid explicitly mentions the I word when sassing back to an Intersoft thug. But... after timidly raising some points it then sweeps everything under the rug so it can focus on the brawls. Same goes for the whole questioning of superheroes vs. antiheroes; at no point is there any question that Kahndaq will need a hero - hell, whenever the residents of Kahndaq, including intrepid archeologist lady, look at Adam they look as if they were seconds away from an orgasm.

 And fuuuuuuck does this movie overestimate how fascinating we'll find Black Adam and his antiheroing ways. Someone needs to remind WB that we've already seen antiheroes before, even within DC - the concept had been pounded to paste by Zach Snyder's ponderous, shitty, brainless take for hour upon endless hour, and then (for contrast) it was handled with grace and humor by James Gunn in his terrific Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. This one adds precisely nothing of interest to the conversation, despite putting the subject front and center.

 So... very much a spectacle movie, then. Luckily on that front it does pretty well.
 Catalan-born director Jaume Collet-Serra ably apes Zach Snyder's style down to the desaturated palette, soundtrack and variable-speed action. There's nothing here that will stick in the memory for long, but it's all entertaining if a bit stretched out; As in Snyder's films, there's a bit of abuse of slow-mo, especially when it's used to allow those involved to strike cool poses rather than clarify what's going on.

 It's breezier than any of Snyder's superhero crap, less self-serious (there are a couple of jokes here and there, some of them good, and a fun Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone homage) and it doesn't insist on insulting our intelligence at every which turn. Only on a few turns, and the abuse is pretty mild compared to BvS.

 The actors do what they can with slim pickings. Dwayne Johnson has shown that he has enormous reserves of  charm and good comic timing, but they go untapped here; his one-note performance as Black Adam is all about intensity, which gets kind of boring pretty quickly. Pierce Brosnan gets to have a lot more fun as a wise avuncular uncle type, and he single-handedly elevates a lot of the character drama through sheer charisma. Finally, I did like Aldis Hodge as Hawkman, he makes for a good asshole.

 

 So, with the lowered expectations I approach any superhero movie these days, this was a modest success. It does what it sets out to do, its many many problems worth at most an eye-roll, not a facepalm. It's loud, crass, dumb, and it overstays its welcome by at least twenty minutes, but its action makes for an enjoyable way to waste a Saturday afternoon.