BLACK ADAM

By this point, I shouldn't be surprised DC screwed up another one of their properties, yet here we are again. Dwayne Johnson stars as the title character, a slave who was given the power of the gods before being locked away for the last 5,000 years. Having recently been freed, Black Adam now inflicts his brand of justice upon our present-day. A big theme within the film is hero vs anti-hero and which category Black Adam falls in. Coming into the film the marketing surrounding him tells us he's an anti-hero and it's very easy to see early-on why that is. In fact, the script is flipped here where the hero would normally have to vanquish the villain, here Black Adam is going up against a group of hero's by the name of the Justice Society of America (although in the film they're known simply as the Justice Society). When you have an unestablished comic book property (unestablished to a majority of the movie going audience), Dwayne Johnson as your lead, and a former James Bond (Pierce Brosnan), this should have been a homerun on paper but turned out anything but. The film rapidly opens up with a narrator whom you're attempting to keep up with and the pacing never seems to let up too much (which is not a good thing). Ever once in a while it's important for the audience to be able to catch their breath and absorb what's being presented to them. Here, there's no time for that. The film seems crammed and rushed. Once again, the film introduces us to the Justice Society comprising of Dr. Fate (Brosnan), Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell). The issue with the group is none of the characters have any depth. We know very little about them, their background, how and why they're doing what they're doing so it's hard to invest an emotional connection with any one of them, let alone all 4. Like any comic book film nowadays the writer's attempt to inject a few doses of humor to lighten the mood but those attempts were all in vain, not just by myself but the rest of the theater I saw the film with as you could hear a pin drop after the delivery of these one-liners. There's only 2 positives I walked away from this film with: the mid-credit scene plants a huge seed that fans will be salivating to grow I'm sure (and if I'm being completely honest, I would be more excited to see that play out than this film). The second was by sheer common sense that DC took Dwayne Johnson's advice and they gave Black Adam his own film and didn't attempt to shoehorn him into SHAZAM, which was at one point a possibility. While this review isn't very flattering, I didn't hate the film. In fact, I wanted to like it. I was curious and a bit excited when the lights went down and DC unfortunately didn't deliver again and this is further proof why new leadership, which is now somewhat installed, was needed. 5.5/10