SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers for “Black Adam.”
It’s kind of a cheat, casting someone as massive as Dwayne Johnson to play a DC superhero — or antihero, in the case of “Black Adam,” an action-packed, adolescent-skewing standalone that presents the swole Samoan star as a nearly invincible global threat. Black Adam is basically an A-bomb in human form, whose emergence from a 5,000-year lockdown calls for emergency intervention by the Justice Society of America, or “JSA,” which dispatches four glorified bench-warmers to contain the situation: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge, gruff), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo, doofy), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell, colorful) and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan, the standout, even if his character reads like a second-rate Doctor Strange).
Ex-wrestler “The Rock” is built on an altogether different scale from everyone else in the DC universe (the next-closest hulk would be “Aquaman” star Jason Momoa), suggesting by body type alone that he could beat anyone “from this planet.” Wink wink. Was it an accident or shrewd marketing strategy that leaked an end-credits scene — spoiler-sensitive readers should skip to the next paragraph — featuring Black Adam confronted by DC’s most iconic character? After all, this summer’s “DC League of Super-Pets” wrapped with Krypto (also voiced by Dwayne Johnson) meeting Black Adam’s Basenji, with whom he debates the meaning of “antihero”: “It’s basically exactly like a regular hero, except way cooler. You make up your own rules, and then you break them.” The prospect that the super-egos attached to these two canines might one day collide transforms this spectacular (but otherwise pointless) one-off/origin story into a feature-length tease. The payoff is still to come, but here, audiences are presented with the moral and emotional backstory for a future showdown.
After all, this summer’s “DC League of Super-Pets” wrapped with Krypto (also voiced by Dwayne Johnson) meeting Black Adam’s Basenji, with whom he debates the meaning of “antihero”: “It’s basically exactly like a regular hero, except way cooler. You make up your own rules, and then you break them.” The prospect that the super-egos attached to these two canines might one day collide transforms this spectacular (but otherwise pointless) one-off/origin story into a feature-length tease. The payoff is still to come, but here, audiences are presented with the moral and emotional backstory for a future showdown.
When it comes to comic book movies, it’s widely acknowledged that the villains are more compelling than the heroes. As such, there’s definite promise in DC’s decision to break Black Adam off into his own film (the character essentially outgrew 2019’s “Shazam!” for which he was originally intended to be the antagonist), entrusting the project to Spanish helmer Jaume Collet-Serra, who previously directed Johnson in “Jungle Cruise,” tapping “Joker” DP Lawrence Sher to shoot this one. Not every DC villain deserves his own movie, of course, but when you have a star persona on the scale of Johnson’s, audiences are likely to appreciate learning where the character comes from.
“Black Adam” is built around the notion that Teth Adam, as he’s referred to for most of the movie, isn’t evil so much as really, really angry. The surprisingly serious-minded (but still plenty pulpy) project deprives Johnson of his greatest superpower — his sense of humor — while giving the now-straight-faced star a chance to play a character with some interesting contradictions. His instinct is to kill anyone who upsets him, and yet, he can still be reasoned with. This flexibility will prove crucial, since there’s a far more malevolent (if not especially memorable) character scheming to liberate Kahndaq, the fictional quasi-Egyptian country where the entire film takes place.
It’s an unusual move for DC to base an entire superhero feature in the Middle East — although it’s a homecoming of sorts for Johnson, whose film career kicked off playing the Scorpion King in “The Mummy Returns.” Doubly daring is the way “Black Adam” aligns our sympathies with the locals, who call upon an ancient hero to help overthrow the white mercenaries extracting precious Eternium from their land. In the film’s “300”-style prologue, the powerful mineral is responsible for transforming a lowly slave into a practically godlike figure — with the help of several wizards.
Flash forward to the present day. Tired of living in a state of oppression, a group of rebels led by tough gal Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) go looking for a legendary crown made of Eternium. Co-written by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, “Black Atom” features a lot more action than most DC movies, cramming the exposition into a series of supercharged set-pieces — including an early “Tomb Raider”-like sequence, wherein Adrianna and three accomplices explore a cave, recovering the crown and unleashing Teth Adam from his millennia-long imprisonment.
Looking thoroughly annoyed, his neck thick as a bunyan tree trunk, Johnson levitates into the first of many confrontations, blasting blue lightning from his fists. Bullets bounce off his bald dome; bazookas barely slow him down. Collet-Serra has studied everything from “The Matrix” to “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” basing his own visual style on favorite tricks from more original films. Half the reason it’s so hard to take comic book movies seriously stems from lazy devices like Eternium and wizards, which “Black Adam” accepts without the slightest hesitation.
The movie is essentially “Shane” on steroids, set in the Middle East instead of the Old West, but still seen through the eyes of a young boy — Adrianna’s comic book-obsessed son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), in this case — who idolizes a figure of questionable morality. As with “Shane,” sticking a kid in the middle of the story brings the entire project down to a middle-school-level intellect. And yet, except for the recent Batman movies, that’s how most of the DC films feel.
At least there’s enough complexity in the post-colonial politics of Kahndaq to engage adults, despite all the “Kindergarten Cop”-style nonsense involving Amon, who skateboards around with the crown in his backpack for a while, before being kidnapped by bad-guy Ishmael (Marwan Kenzari). Instead of simply waiting around for Black Adam to save the day, the movie’s young characters stand up directly to their oppressors. That also goes for a heroic teenager named Hurut (Jalon Christian) featured in the film’s ancient-history prologue: His fate lends an emotional dimension to Teth Adam’s backstory.
The most out-of-place characters here are the quartet representing the JSA. Adrianna rightly questions why Hawkman and friends should show up now, after a villainous organization called Intergang has been exploiting them for years. Black Adam may be billed as an antihero, but by “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic, he’s more helpful to these Kahndaq freedom fighters than the JSA. Fight scenes involving Hawkman, Atom Smasher and Cyclone pose strange challenges, considering their powers, while Doctor Fate at least gives the visual effects team some fun tricks to animate.
No one’s allowed to upstage Johnson, however — not even a bulging demon named Sabbac who appears near the end. Clearly, the film’s whole purpose is to give Black Adam a suitably grand introduction on the assumption that he’ll be pitted against a more deserving adversary soon enough.
Peter Debruge
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