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Black Adam Is Entertaining Rubbish

Bilge Ebiri is a film critic for New York magazine and Vulture. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Criterion Collection, among others.

Watching The Rock do stone-faced feels like we’re being deprived of something precious. Photo: Warner Bros.

Black Adam opens with a burst of exposition and backstory so cumbersome that it might as well be self-parody. (“Before Rome, before Babylon, before the pyramids …”) Though totally different in tenor and style, it actually reminded me of the opening moments of Whit Stillman’s 2016 period comedy Love & Friendship, which delivered such a rapid-fire stream of character information that it liberated the viewer from feeling like they needed to pay attention to any of it; they could just sit back and enjoy the ride. That’s kind of what happens with Black Adam, too, though it’s probably not intentional. The film ultimately overloads us with so much amazing nonsense that we sort of give up and give in.

But amid the mumbo jumbo about dark magic and the crown of Sabbaq and the six demons of the underworld or whatever, there is a promising idea at the heart of Black Adam, at least initially. The film is set in the imaginary Middle Eastern country of Kahndaq, an ancient and once-proud land currently occupied by a mercenary force called the Intergang. Not unlike Palestinians and Iraqis, the impoverished citizens have had their culture trampled and are bedeviled by checkpoints and soldiers having their way with the population. By the time Black Adam — known at first as Teth-Adam — emerges from his ancient slumber, a supernaturally powerful champion of Khandaq who’s been dormant for 5000 years, the film has convinced us in its own clunky way that this besieged land could use someone on its side.

Which makes Black Adam the movie’s greatest shortcoming that much more tragic. Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock, one of our most charming movie stars, plays the character as a humorless, unemotional slab. One can sort of see the inspiration here: The actor was often compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier in his career, and the film at times seems to be going for a Terminator 2: Judgment Day vibe; there’s even an excitable, skateboarding teen who tries to teach Adam catchphrases and how to act like a hero. But Johnson, while limited in range, was never an awkward actor in the way Schwarzenegger was. He’s always been a much more likable and expressive figure (even if his movies mostly pale in comparison to Schwarzenegger’s) and watching him do stone-faced feels like we’re being deprived of something precious. It’s only toward the end of the film that a glimmer of recognition flashes across our hero’s visage, as the grim inexpressiveness strays into something closer to deadpan. It’s welcome, but it’s too late.

Perhaps more importantly, this annoying stoniness doesn’t allow Johnson to act much either. We know he can do it, and the occasionally evocative dialogue about the state of his land aches for some emotion. (“Just say ‘shazam’ and we all go home.” “I don’t have a home.” “We both know you’re not supposed to be here.” “You’re not supposed to be here.”) Imagine lines like these delivered with even a hint of bitterness, or despair, or simmering rage, and you start to imagine the far better and even more pointed film Black Adam could have been. There is, it turns out, a narrative reason for the character’s refusal to feel things. But it’s a dopey reason, and it feels like a cop-out. Worse, it undercuts the movie: Johnson is so emotionless for so much of the film that if you told me he wasn’t actually there for the shoot and that they just used a still photo of his face to animate his scenes, I’d believe you.

That said, all is not lost. Director Jaume Collet-Serra — a journeyman who specialized in surprisingly gonzo thrillers before he did a full 180 into family fare — brings an enjoyable sense of exuberant splatter to his action scenes. We often complain about how the modern comic-book movie has been CGI’d into meaninglessness, how everything in these pictures feels cartoonish and weightless and bland. Black Adam won’t do anything to disprove that notion, but Collet-Serra’s perversity and propensity for gallows-humor slapstick keeps things lively. Limbs are yanked off. Smoking boots remain where once there were humans. Bodies are tossed into the sky with near-psychotic abandon. One dude swallows a grenade. Black Adam is PG-13, so there’s no real blood. But this is America, so there are plenty of amputations.

The nutty, schlocky frivolity of Black Adam might not go with its occasional pretensions toward greater meaning (or even its, gasp, political overtones), but it does feel of a piece with the fly-by-night nature of its story. Because after offering up all that fanciful ancient history about the origins of the character we will know as Black Adam, the movie then proceeds to casually introduce us to a whole bunch of superheroes as if we’ve somehow known them all along: Kent Nelson, a.k.a. Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan); Carter Hall, a.k.a. Hawkman (Aldis Hodge); Albert Rothstein, a.k.a. Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo); Maxine Hunkel, a.k.a. Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell). Some of these characters date back to the 1940s — long before Marvel, in other words — but for those of us who didn’t encounter them in our comic-book reading days, it’s hard not to wonder who the hell they are. The film assumes a certain familiarity with them, which can sometimes make it feel like we’re watching a cut-rate imitation brand Asylum Entertainment version of an Avengers or X-Men movie. We haven’t had a Doctor Fate movie, or a Hawkman sequel, or an Atom Smasher series, or whatever. That makes these characters feel a bit like imitations, even if their original comic book iterations have been around forever.

But even here, Black Adam has something intriguing it starts doing, only to promptly give up on it. The Justice Society shows up to teach Black Adam and the angry citizens of Kahndaq that extrajudicial killings are wrong (a character literally says this), and someone points out that the Justice Society, for all the work it’s supposedly been doing around the world to battle oppression and bring justice, has never before come to the troubled land of Kahndaq. That would, of course, make these superheroes hypocrites and colonizers of a different sort. Okay! That’s interesting! Let’s do something with tha— but no, the film drops this idea almost as soon as it’s expressed, as if it realizes that to go any further in that direction would unearth attitudes and ideologies that might ultimately work against the bottom line.

The way Black Adam treats the Justice Society also seems symptomatic of Warner Bros. and DC Comics’ attempts to replicate Disney and Marvel’s success with their various superhero team-ups without doing any of the table-setting required to make us feel like we have something invested in these characters’ fates. Without giving away any spoilers, the film actually attempts a couple of ambitious moments during its finale that feel like they were meant to be big emotional climaxes for heroes we’ve been watching for years. These scenes don’t work the way the picture wants them to. Instead, they work in the other direction, which is to enhance the whole goofy, off-the-rack nature of this operation. The lack of cinematic mythology, the absence of a dozen other movies that we have to catch up with beforehand, unburdens us as viewers. It may undermine the film’s attempts at emotion, but it also allows us to sit back and enjoy it. Honestly, after more than a decade of overbaked cookie-cutter superhero flicks, I’ll take it. Just don’t ask me to care about anybody.