Black Adam (2022)
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the Egyptian gods—and imprisoned just as quickly—Black Adam is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world.
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What critics say influenced Black Adam
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.
And, instead of allowing Dwayne Johnson’s natural charisma to come to the fore, the requirements of the script demand that he ape Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character (from Terminator 2), right down to the young male sidekick.
Johnson’s movie-star career has long reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, and Black Adam feels deeply indebted to Terminator 2, where Schwarzenegger turned his rampaging villain of the first film into a shotgun-wielding champion who learned a code of morality from a wisecracking teen.
He also develops a relationship with the young Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) that clearly took inspiration from the Terminator and John Connor in T2 .
Which is a shame since the early related efforts sort of give the impression this could be akin to the second coming of Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 cyborg in "Terminator 2" and learning about his trappings (and slang and so on) from the teen he's sent there to protect.
The viciousness feels unearned; Black Adam bends over backward to link its antihero to Clint Eastwood's iconic Man with No Name, but apart from a few flashes of PG-13 gore (signature-free Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra grasps for the vibe of Terminator 2: Judgment Day ), the film is unusually toothless.
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.
It doesn’t go well for the Society, which consists of Hawkman (Alids Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centieno), and who’s number one priority is stopping Adam’s destruction, except it’s hard to take them seriously when they feel like second stringers from the “X-Men” and “Deadpool” roster.
Largely humorless with an extremely bonkers third act, "Black Adam" feels derivative of many other superhero movies that have come before it like "X-Men" and "Captain America: Civil War." Once again, DC delivers a film where interesting characters are trapped in a mediocre and predictable superhero movie.
Hawkman’s jet also comes into play because the launch sequence is right out of the “X-Men” movies — another example of how it’s all been done before.
The JSA sections of the movie are where Collet-Serra seems to be most engaged, even when he and his visual effects team have these DC heroes leave Hawkman’s estate in a manor similar to Marvel’s X-Men .
The Justice Society isn't new on the page, and some of its number pre-date their patent Marvel counterparts — but reaching the screen now, after the MCU and the X-Men movies, makes this bunch seem like a rehash.
Along the way, the director tries to imbue the serious tone with some laughs, including a scene where Adam replicates the famous standoff scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), something he just witnessed on television.
The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black” also blesses the Black Adam soundtrack, providing a musical cue that’s as cheesy as a The Good, the Bad and the Ugly gag is out-of-left-field groan-worthy.
So now there are scenes of Black Adam shooting a television showing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly just as Clint Eastwood draws his pistol.
And when it shows iconic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on a TV screen, wishing you were watching that instead comes swiftly — or watching Aquaman's gleeful ridiculousness, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)'s rampant flair, or the non-DCEU weightiness of Joker or The Batman, actually.
After we get through what seemed like an hour - but is really about 5 minutes - of the history (complete with badly written voiceover) of the non-hero-hero that will become “Black Adam,” we get the teen-ish boy skateboarding through the fictional city like kids skateboarding isn’t something that stop being an effective movie trope since Back To The Future did it perfectly in 1985.
Be that as it may, such offerings usually use that out of place character bit for laughs (think of Marty McFly's initial interaction with the 1950s in "Back to the Future"), but sometimes it's present to point a finger at societal norms and so on.
The number of — ahem — call-backs to other films is pretty sad — “Tomb Raider,” “Back to the Future” and plenty of “Star Wars” (even, unforgivably, the line “You’re our only hope”.)
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(“ 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 Black Adam kneels before and could simply be mashing up parts of 300, Clash of the Titans and Tomb Raider for much of its running time, especially visually, just makes a dull movie duller (the DCEU really can't move on from Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League director Zack Snyder, so it seems).
Co-written by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, “Black Adam” 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.
The number of — ahem — call-backs to other films is pretty sad — “Tomb Raider,” “Back to the Future” and plenty of “Star Wars” (even, unforgivably, the line “You’re our only hope”.)
After some flaccid “Tomb Raider” stylings, as Adrianna and her painfully unfunny brother Karim (Mohammed Amer) go into the caves, they’re thwarted by traitors to the cause, and whoopsie-doodle, they awaken Teth Adam, who kills pretty much everyone but them.
He is awakened centuries later by Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), when she and her colleagues go Tomb Raider -ing in Khandaq for a powerful crown made out of Eternium.
In an odd way, Black Adam serves as a reminder that Will Smith’s underrated Hancock came about a decade too early in the comic book boom to serve as the satirical tool it hoped to be.
As he lectures Black Adam on how to make himself marketable, you flash to movies like Hancock .
The comic book version of Sabbac is this beefy and beastly big horned beast of a demon whereas the film version of him is clunky and is along the lines of the bestial form of Dracula in the 2004 Van Helsing movie.
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However, this trajectory is weighed down by a stone-faced performance from Johnson, who can’t seem to decide whether he’s a conflicted anti-hero, with his numerous lines of dialogue about how he isn’t really a savior, or whether he’s George of the Jungle, with occasional hints of naivete as he gives his one-liners a test run.
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).