Black Adam

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2022

Honestly, I didn’t hate it.

I thought it would be complete crap, and it was nowhere near as crap as I thought it could be. A trusted work colleague mentioned seeing it, and finding it lacklustre, so my expectations were not sky high.

I’m not going to pretend it’s a masterwork either, but sometimes “not as shit as I thought it would be” sometimes is the closest I can get to a ringing recommendation.

I have no previous feelings about the character of Black Adam, nor can I really understand why Dwayne The Rock Johansson has been obsessed with playing the character for over a decade. Johnson has one mode and one facial expression in this flick throughout, and I am totally okay with it when it’s this facial expression and this mode: bad motherfucker who fucks up anyone who looks at him sideways. He doesn’t have to cajole people or convince them there’s a better way – he can just kill people with a flick of his wrist and minimal effort to do otherwise.

It’s everyone else that’s a bit of a letdown compared to that.

Whatever the fuck exactly that Teth Adam, as they call him throughout the film until the veriest of very ends, is, he spends much of the movie casually killing mercenaries from something called Intergang, a bunch of Scottish, English and maybe, I dunno, Dutch guys who have taken over this mythical Middle Eastern country called Kahndaq. I don’t know where on a map you’re meant to find it either.

Would you believe that five thousand years ago, some shit went down when a slave fought back against his masters, something something a demonic crown, then more something something, five thousand years later Teth Adam wakes up from sleepy bo bos time, and starts killing people.

Except he ain’t killing Kahndaqians – just anyone else that annoys him. These Intergang jerks are looking for the demonic crown, but some natives are trying to stop them from getting it.

Along come the Justice Society. Not, it is important to note, the Justice League. If the League is where virtual gods Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Superman, the fast guy no-one talks about anymore because of his legal troubles, and Ben “Batman” Lopez hang out, then a significant step down from there must be the Society. The Justice Society, dispatched by always nasty piece of work Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is sent not to take out or disrupt the Intergang, which has been ruling this country with an iron fist in order to extract its natural rare minerals (in this case Eternium. No, not Vibranium. No, not Unobtainium. I SAID Eternium. I’m sure it’s very different from the other ones), but to stop Teth Adam.

Why? I wasn’t really sure. Waller quite often, other than randomly wanting people to be killed, often seems to be an embodiment of what US policy used to be like in the Cold War period – staging coups, oppressing populations just for the sake of it, killing those opposed to her puppet regimes. What they do here only makes sense to me if Intergang are doing what Waller wants anyway.

Regardless of that, the film’s script is not sophisticated enough for Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindel) and (ugh) Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) to eventually realise they’re just tools of colonialist oppression. Instead they act like they’re the actual good guys, which we know is bullshit.

So, first they try to take Teth Adam down, and he hands their asses to them. Then they, mostly being Hawkman, keeping alternating between threatening him and trying to get him to see reason. Their biggest problem is that while he might be trying to protect some of the people of Kahndaq, he keeps killing all these mercs when he doesn’t have to.

He never pretended to be a good guy, though. He keeps repeatedly telling everyone, even those who idolise him, that he’s not a hero, and he’s just here to kill people and chew bubble gum, and he’s all out of bubble gum.

Johnson naturally plays this character like a heel, like a bad guy, but without any need to try to charm the audience into either siding with him or delighting in booing him. He has to turn the dial down on his natural charisma, which is probably a shame for those who were hoping he’d be a quip machine and that he’d grace us with at least one arched eyebrow. Whatever else other people didn’t like about his performance here, I vastly preferred it, or at least enjoyed it more than whatever it is he thinks he’s doing in those Fast & Furious movies.

You know the ones, they’re all about family? Here at least he has an excuse for being smugly superior – in the F&F flicks he mostly seems irritated or bored.

But what is he here, really? He’s pretty much a god, just not one with a moral compass in alignment with what we hope for or accept, based on Truth, Justice and the American Way. He is certainly nothing like Superman, despite pretty much having all the same powers, because he wasn’t brought up by good-hearted decent folk like Ma & Pa Kent in Smallville.

This guy here grew up 5000 years ago and was a child slave mining Vibranium, sorry, Eternium.

Or was he? There is something of a minor twist in that the story of Kahndaq’s mightiest hero is not the one that even the locals know. They keep showing Teth Adam staring at a massive statue supposedly in his honour, and the true story is, dare I say it, somewhat affecting, and it explains why he chooses to go along with a (profoundly dumb) choice two thirds of the way through the film.

Just delaying the inevitable, is all I could think when they do the dumb thing, involving an underwater prison. At least it was fun to see Emilia “Hardcore” Harcourt in that brief scene, that some people might remember from the most excellent Peacemaker series that we were blessed with in 2022. She also happens to be James Gunn’s wife, so like Gunn’s brother Sean, I expect to see her in everything James Gunn is involved with, which seems to be fucking everything whether it’s Marvel or DC.

Sure, watching superpowered people punch on with little fear of being hurt or killed for hours, or otherwise killing random henchmen could get boring, but I didn’t get bored, I actually found it quite amusing. The overall plot about the demonic crown and some guy wanting to be the king of Kahndaq and / or of all the demons, well, someone had to do it just to give Adam an excuse to tear someone in half in the end.

Every flick needs a villain even when the main character is technically a villain, so I have zero issue with the genericness of that villain. I kinda also enjoyed time spent with the Kahndaq people – resistance fighter Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), her skateboarding son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), whose bedroom covered in DC merch keeps getting progressively destroyed, and the weird brother / uncle Karim (Mohammed Amir), who is definitely going to die because of electricity, apparently.

I liked some of the arguments Adrianna and her son make to the Justice Society about why did the only show up once Kahndaq had its hero back, having ignored their plight for 27 years, in a country that is perpetually under the boot of a foreign power. Kinda like Palestine – but let’s not go there. If only some Palestinian hero could rise from the dead and cast off the shackles of Zionist oppression – Rise Yassar Arafat, Rise!

I kid, I kid. I kid because I love. I will always side with the oppressed over the oppressor, and so someone who appears and tries to break the chains of the status quo, even if their methods are less than in alignment with the Geneva Convention, has my vote.

Because they’re trying to make the world a better place.

By killing one bad guy at a time. Sometimes two.

It’s not a reach to kinda point out that the dynamic they have here, with the boy and the heroic anti-hero, is kinda Cliff Notes cribbed from Terminator 2, even down to discussing catch phrases and the not killing people (which he sort of gets to, after probably killing maybe hundreds of mercenaries?). It’s not a bad dynamic, just not a particularly novel one.

I enjoyed Black Adam. I dread to see what they do next with the character, but based on the ending of the flick, when he’s given a chance to sit on the throne, and then elects to do something completely different about it, it could be something interesting. I mean, he does meet up with a certain boy in blue at the very end, but I guess that’s only natural.

Black Adam. Not as shit as you thought it would be.

7 times I thought Pierce Brosnan walked away with the movie under his arm like his shiny gold helmet out of 10. Where’s his franchise, huh?
--
“You know, gods, demons... Whoever's waiting for us in the afterlife. And you wear a lot of black, so we should really lean into that. My point is, you could be famous. Magazines, lunch boxes, video games. And the superhero industrial complex is worth a lot of money.” - Black Adam