Hollywood is deep in a strange period of cultural flux, one in which #MeToo is viewed with increased suspicion, wokeness has become a punchline, and race, gender identity and complex geopolitics are routinely monetised in the service of corporate content strategy. Representation matters – especially when there's profit to be made.
Early on in Warner Bros' new superhero movie Black Adam, a teenager in the fictional but unmistakably Middle Eastern city of Kahndaq confronts a white soldier from an occupying army. "You're just a neo-imperialist enforcer," he seethes, with all the conviction of a screenplay siphoned from a few hours spent on social media.
A few scenes later, the same kid – Amon Tomaz (Bodhi Sabongui), whose comic-book fandom marks him as both audience surrogate and gift-shop salesman – is urging Dwayne Johnson's titular superhero to come up with a catchphrase while dispensing with bad guys.
"We could really use a superhero right now," the awe-struck teen implores the hero. Besides, he reasons, "the superhero industrial complex is worth a lot of money".
To say that DC's latest, tonally confused superhero entry wants it both ways – gesturing to progressive politics while keeping its eye on moving lunch boxes – is an understatement. In both its big ideas and multimillion-dollar contradictions, Black Adam is to the DC universe what Black Panther was to Marvel – though its execution, and its commitment to its concept, is far less fascinating.
In an exhaustingly overcooked prologue, we learn that Kahndaq was once an enlightened ancient civilisation, before a despot by the name of Anh-Kot invaded the city and enslaved its people, forcing them to mine for Eternium – not a fragrance by Calvin Klein, but a supernaturally charged precious metal from which the king intends to forge a magical, all-powerful crown.
But Anh-Kot's rule was challenged by a slave known as Teth-Adam, who was gifted with superhuman abilities by an ancient order of wizards in order to lead his people in revolt. For his trouble – and some apparent anger-management issues – Teth-Adam was imprisoned for 5,000 years, while the myth of the people's champion endured.
In present-day occupied Kahndaq, a group of freedom fighters, lead by archaeologist Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi), are trying to retrieve the crown before the invading forces – a vaguely global, high-tech consortium called Intergang, with ties to the former king – get their hands on it.
The ensuing melee frees Teth-Adam from his five-millennia incarceration, setting Johnson loose on a slowmo, neck-snapping rampage that looks like it was dropped in directly from a Comic-Con sizzle reel.
Black Adam, who began life as an outright villain upon his comic-book debut in 1945, has since morphed into a kind of complicated antihero, which means he's soon on the radar of Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), head of the Suicide Squad task force charged with rounding up miscreants for supposed good.
To catch her latest mark, Waller enlists the Justice Society, a superhero team headed up by Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), whose ranks include the rainbow tornado-spinning Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), matter-manipulating Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), and white-haired sorcerer Doctor Fate – played by a cheerfully laid-back Pierce Brosnan, the latest veteran star to bank a comic-book pay cheque.
The appearance of these global interventionists, with their distinctly Avengers vibe, gives the screenplay – credited to Adam Sztykiel, Sohrab Noshirvani and Rory Haines – some of its best moments, interrogating both the nature of political meddling and these films' tendency to draw neat lines between good and evil across a morally complex terrain.
But quips about the Justice Society – not to mention DC stablemates Batman and Superman – neglecting Kahndaq are brushed aside in favour of Warner Bros' relentless product placement; these superheroes could never truly be villains when there's an antihero to coopt and merchandise to peddle, and the film swiftly finds its core villain in the racially ambiguous Sabbac (Marwan Kenzari), a descendant of Anh-Kot hell-bent on taking back his rule.
Black Adam is something of a passion project for Johnson, who's been circling the movie in some form for the past 15 years, and it marks a curious impasse for his career. The star has been coasting on his supersized off-screen charisma for so long now that it's refreshing to see him wrestle with a character whose default mode – something to do with 5,000 years in prison – is pissed off, his self-awareness sanded down to a scowl that seems hewn from stone.
Still, Johnson's inherently amiable vibe is at odds with a character he seems to have outgrown, making it hard for him to hold down the menace required to make Black Adam truly dangerous to the status quo – to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, he's not really bad, just drawn that way.
It's a credit to Johnson that he's stuck with this project, but for all of Black Adam's audacious, potentially landscape-shifting ideas, the film ultimately – and sadly, all too predictably – reverts to another generic super-showdown, slathered in computer-generated effects that bulldoze any nuance.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown; The Shallows), Johnson's apparent go-to brand stylist after their creaky collaboration on Jungle Cruise, understands the ugly grandeur of computer-generated splatter, but his action-movie auteurism is buried beneath a slew of digital effects that carry the usual anonymous imprint.
It's a mess, though rarely an entertaining one.
Black Adam is a semi-serious-minded film in which characters still dress in costume-ball fantabula and shout "Shazam!" in moments of darkest peril, except there's zero hint of camp – or even the goofy self-awareness that made its sort-of predecessor, 2019's Shazam!, a surprisingly likeable confection.
Torn between the weight of its ideas and the need to craft IMAX-sized spectacle for a popcorn audience, the film ends up delivering on neither. It wants to advocate for – or at least acknowledge the potential of – real-world revolution, yet defers to the image of a super-being levitating above the city in a fancy, custom-fitted cape.
"The people need a hero," Black Adam tells his son at one point, in a flashback to their struggle in ancient times.
"No father," the kid replies, "they need to be free."
Hollywood can't seem to make up its mind.
Black Adam is in cinemas now.
