Film Review: Black Adam

 

Sexuality/Nudity Acceptable
Violence Mature
Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Acceptable

Those who are frequent readers of this blog know that when it comes to comic book movies, I am very easy to please.  I am not a snob when it comes to content or lore.  Perhaps my bar is set too low, but if the movie can nail the core of a character while giving me some action-movie thrills, then I am satisfied.

On that score, Black Adam delivered.

And while I think this was a good, fun movie, I can't help but be a little frustrated.  With a few simple tweaks, it could have been a great comic book movie.

Black Adam stars Dwayne Johnson as the titular character.  In the fictional Mid-East country of Khandaq, the people are being oppressed by the oligarchical foreign group called Intergang.  But the people remember the ancient legend of a young slave boy from thousands of years earlier who was granted the power of the gods by the wizard Shazam (Djimon Honsou) and freed the people from oppression.  There are those in modern Khandaq who are resisting the regime like Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), her funny brother Karim (Mohammed Amer), and her skateboarding, comic-book-loving son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui).  When Adrianna unwittingly sets Adam free, they cannot tell if he is a liberating hero or a murderous monster.  When word of his return reaches the States, Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) orders the Justice Society (not to be confused with the Justice League) to capture him.  This superhero team consists of alpha-male Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), wizend wizard Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan), free-spirit Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and rookie Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo).  As the conflicts between Adam and the Justice Society as well as Intergang escalate, a new evil arises that could threaten them all.

Johnson has been trying to put together a Black Adam movie for years and he was right to keep pursuing this.  I loved him in this part.  He uses all of his smolder and charisma to bring the right amount of stature and menace to the part.  His first line nails the character.  As Intergang soldiers are firing a barrage of bullets at him, he grabs one and looks at it saying disdainfully, "Your magic is weak."  He doesn't overplay it, he simply observes their inferiority.  

Throughout the movie, Adam moves with a masculine and destructive energy everywhere he goes.  The humor that comes through the character is wisely played straight.  Adam likes to simply walk through walls like tissue paper.  He tends to fly vertically rather than in the traditional horizontal position.  And he has this wonderful habit of simply hovering near you so that you never forget that he is the one in charge.

In the comics, Adam is a complete foil to the modern Shazam.  Whereas Billy Batson is a kid full of child-like wonder at his powers, Adam is a world-weary warrior who constantly looks at his enemies with the dismissive disdain of buzzing mosquitos (and he dispatches them with a similar level of dispassion).  Like the character the Punisher in Marvel, Black Adam scratches an itch in fans of the superhero genre to have the characters sometimes just cut loose.  I particularly liked one of his earlier scenes where he tears through an army to The Rolling Stones song "Paint it Black."  

The Jaume Collet-Serra (who recently worked with Johnson on Jungle Cruise) does a good job with the big action set pieces.  Although I have to say after watching Top Gun: Maverick a number of times, I find I am less satisfied with CGI as opposed to practical effects.  Regardless, Collet-Serra knows how to competently stage a scene and how to let Johnson's charisma take over.

Most of the performances are good.  I liked that Shahi felt like a woman who had been through life's ringer.  She was not simply damsel in distress nor a girl-boss.  Amer might be my favorite character as Karim, or at least he has some of the best and funniest lines of the movie.  Hodge does a good job of matching Johnson's rugged masculinity so that you can believably see how neither would back down.  Brosnan brings an element of refinement to Dr. Fate along with a very subtle sense of sadness, since he can often see the tragic ends of the people he knows.  Swindall brings lots of charisma as Johnson does.  And it feels like they gave Centineo a copy of Tom Holland's performance in Captain America: Civil War and said, "Just do that!"  (which he does very well)

As I wrote above, the biggest detriment to this movie is the script.  The movie makes the mistake of Amon these expositiony speeches, which lead up to him having to give a big inspirational rallying cry to the people of Khandaq, but it just doesn't feel believable. At the beginning he goes on a rant about oppression that made me think of the leader of the Black Panthers yelling at Forrest Gump.  He plays the part that Freddie Freeman did in SHAZAM!, but they also want him to be have more gravitas, which he doesn't have.

 As you can see also, there are a LOT of characters to juggle in a movie where the main focus should be on the mysterious main character.  The script does a decent job of selling the team chemistry, but the actors really are the ones who do most of the work with a script that does not give them a lot of character-building scenes to work with.  Finally, the ultimate showdown feels a lot more tacked-on than integrated.

I will say this for the script: the story gets a lot of things right about how to portray Black Adam.  He says very little for most of the first act.  And even when he does, there is power and danger in what he says.  The screenwriters knew how to write his dialogue and how to use his powers, which makes this movie more of a success.

As a comic book fan nitpick, I was disappointed at how Hawkman and Dr. Fate were presented.  One of the reasons that these two characters are often used with Black Adam is because of their connection with the ancient Middle-East.  But none of that is present in the movie.  There is no mention of Hawkman's previous life as Prince Khufu of Egypt, nor how Dr. Fate receives his power from the Lord of Order Nabu, who was Khufu's chief magician.  I understand not wanting to overstuff the movie with extra backstory, but this seemed like it would tie the characters together in a more profound way.

Thematically, the movie deals with the question about what it takes to be a hero.  The Justice Society insists that killing is wrong.  Black Adam challenges this by saying that sometimes you need to kill people in war.  This main tension between Adam and Hawkman forces both characters to re-examine their own absolute stances with a bit more nuance.  The movie also wants to say something about imperialism and international interventionism, but this is where it stumbles because the script is not sophisticated enough to handle this topic well.  But the heart of the story is Adam coming to terms with who he is and the knowledge that he is not the hero that everyone wants him to be.  He has been given the power of the gods though he feels himself unworthy.

Perhaps I am going a little too deep, but it made me reflect on my own unworthiness as a man and as a Christian.  As theology teacher, I stand before others to instruct them in the Gospel.  And yet I am constantly confronted by my own unworthiness.  When Adam finally confronts this reality, his first thought is to take himself out of the equation.  But one of the things the movie tries to get across is that what makes someone a hero is never giving up and being willing to sacrifice for the greater good.  While Adam is more violent than the traditional super-hero, he reminds us that our calling is to step up and do God's work if we are chosen.

Black Adam is a bold and entertaining movie, one that is probably the best superhero movie or TV show since last year's Spider-Man: No Way Home.  It is a movie that is colorful spectacle that is given greater life because of Johnson's charisma.  

Black Adam may feel unworthy, but this movie is worthy.