Spin-off “Shazam!” about a gloomy anti-hero from the ancient world who does not take into account either morality or laws.
Before going to our time, “Black Adam” patter gives an exposition: many years ago, even before Ancient Egypt and even before Mesopotamia, there was a kingdom of Kandak. The tyrant ruler An-Kot (Marwan Kenzari) wanted to create Sabbak’s crown, a demonic artifact that endows the wearer with great power. To do this, you need a lot of the rare mineral ethereum – the population of Kandak went as slaves to the quarries. But one guy started a riot. An-Kot wanted to kill the troublemaker, but he received the powers of the wizards of the earth, became the “champion” of the gods and stopped the tyrant.
Many years later, in the 21st century, Kandak is again in slavery – this time with the international mercenary company Intergang. They are siphoning resources from the country and looking for Sabbak’s crown. But the oppositionist and archeologist Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) finds her first. She, fleeing from the mercenaries, awakens Tet-Adam (Dwayne Johnson) – it seems to be the same champion who has been in a dream for 5000 years. The girl and her son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) hope that the hero will save Kandak. But that liberation of the oppressed is not very interested. And, says the giant, he is no hero.
Dwayne Johnson as Adam in Black Adam
If it seems to you that this is somehow a bit too much for just one plot twist – wait, there is still more to come. Very quickly, after the awakened Adam, the superhero team “Justice Society” is sent, led by a hot-tempered Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and the wizard Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan) as the voice of reason. There are also a couple of young heroes, Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Crusher (Noah Centineo), who will simultaneously act as comic relief and sponsor the main romantic intrigue.
On the side of conditional evil there is also Ishmael (Marwan Kenzari), a friend of Adrianna, who turns out to be a traitor and leader of the Intergang. In general, the storylines here are not on the superhero origin, but at least on a compact mini-series.
Dwayne Johnson as Adam in Black Adam
With Black Adam running for more than two hours, the movie looks like it’s been cut in half. And the point is not only in the suspicious saturation of secondary lines, but also in simple assembly inconsistencies. Periodically, the characters in the action scenes suspiciously teleport (and those who do not have such skills), and many episodes are noticeably out of rhythm – the picture is always in a hurry somewhere, stumbling,does not give a second to rest or at least somehow reflect on what happened. Dwayne Johnson has stated that the film will “change the hierarchy at DC”, redefine the genre, set the course of the Gulf Stream, and most likely end world hunger. It is understandable why “Black Adam” is tormented by the weight of his own ambitions.
Pierce Brosnan as Kent in Black Adam
The tape is trying to put together a long collapsed DC Universe. Not so much in terms of plot (in this sense, only the cameo after the credits is significant, which will probably be watched by more people than the film itself), but stylistically. At some point, the DCEU was tangibly divided into two very different aesthetic camps: the first was Zack Snyder and his monumental, pathetic blockbuster epics, the second was the ironic post-superhero Shazam! and James Gunn with his Suicide Squad and Peacekeeper. “Black Adam” is trying to be both at the same time.
On the one hand, the film by Jaume Collet-Serra is a mythological pathos action movie with an overabundance of aesthetic slow-mo and very “Snyder” colors: there is only yellow against brown or blue against dark blue. On the other hand, a sardonic action-comedy about an alien from another world who does not understand modern morality and learns to pronounce the signature phrase before, and not after, he kills another villain.
Dwayne Johnson as Adam in Black Adam
The second movie comes out much better: “Black Adam” knows how to joke well and sometimes skillfully exploits dashing cynicism – Scala Johnson tears enemies apart with a grin and distributes van liners like a real action hero. Attempts to be a more “serious” blockbuster only interfere with the picture and look inorganic. It is strange to watch how Teth-Adam in one episode pretends to be an impregnable tragic poet, and in the next one he is a joke like the most ordinary Johnson character from the conditional “Jumanji”.
The existential quest of the hero, a man who never wanted to acquire superpowers, is also perceived absurdly against the backdrop of an excessive plot, where there is absolutely no time for drama.
Black Adam looks like a collection of half measures. Dwayne Johnson clearly plans to make the hero one of the main faces of the MCU – while in his own solo album, anyone is more interesting than Tet-Adam. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has the skill to make a competent action, but not enough to remember even one scene a day after watching it. The film touches on a really curious topic of Western-centric superheroes:
Despite the presence of Superman in the world, no one is in a hurry to help the inhabitants of the occupied Kandak until Tet-Adam appears there. But, like everything else, the picture does not have time to develop a thought. Trying to derive some kind of general equation from the disparate style of DC is an idea, maybe a curious one. It’s just difficult to assemble a puzzle when you have parts from completely different sets.
