Review: ‘Black Adam’ vs. The Hierarchies of Power

Black Adam has had a very, very interesting production history. For those uninformed, the film is more or less Dwayne Johnson’s passion project, which he’s been cooking for nearly 15 years. He spent a long time trying to convince producers that the Black Adam character had enough depth to carry his own movie, and such skepticism seemed completely warranted. To explain Black Adam’s DC comic book origins briefly, he is the archnemesis of Shazam, and serves as his mirror image in every way, except Black Adam is EVIL. When Shazam already has a movie of his own, the redundancy of Black Adam is unavoidable. The MCU gets its fair share of criticisms about producing homogenized content, but they’re not out there doing anything as egregious as producing films for both HULK and RED HULK, which is the equivalent of what DC has done here. Walking into the theater for Black Adam, audiences have one question—simply put, why does a Black Adam movie even exist?

Surprisingly, Black Adam manages to quell suspicions that it’s nothing more than an “Evil Shazam” film very early on. The movie travels back 5000 years to introduce us to the legend of Teth-Adam (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), a slave living under the oppression of the tyrannical ruler of his homeland, Kahndaq. After demonstrating his bravery by standing up to his oppressors, Teth-Adam is visited by a tribunal of wizards (including the wizard Shazam, who audiences may recognize from the film Shazam!) who bestow godly powers upon him, transforming Teth-Adam from just another freedom fighter into the Liberator of Kahndaq. Using his newfound power, Teth-Adam swears that the people of Kahndaq will never face subjugation again, but his “extreme” methods drive the wizard tribunal to imprison him into a state of eternal slumber. During the 5000 years of Teth-Adam’s imprisonment, Kahndaq has fallen victim to Western imperialism and military occupation by the United States. The nation’s only hope for freedom lies in a fringe rebellion group’s ability to release Teth-Adam from his tomb so he can liberate his people once again.

Black Adam is far from a complex take on anti-imperialist ideology, but the presence of any sort of political edge was a pleasant surprise. Especially considering the context of the DCEU, which has coasted by on a simplistic “popcorn flick” ethos ever since Warner Bros. cut their ties to Zack Snyder. Conceptually, it feels bold to position Black Adam, a radical nationalist with a burning hatred of Western oppression, as the film’s protagonist. It feels even bolder that DC uses this film to introduce the Justice Society of America, an all-American team of marketable superheroes, and depicts them as an antagonistic force designed to suppress civil rights abroad. Was DC really about to pull off tackling such a heavy subject?

Nah.

For every step forward Black Adam makes, it makes a series of bumbling missteps backwards. The film suffers from the issues that usually plague “hero vs. hero” movies: that DC is too cowardly to let either party ever come off as “wrong” at any given moment. That middle-ground storytelling approach absolutely flops in the context of the story. Sure, Teth-Adam tells Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan) that it’s “not their country, not their decision”, yet he continues to compromise with them over and over to no end. Not only does this completely undermine the ruthlessness of Black Adam (the foremost selling point of the film, according to its marketing) but it also subverts Black Adam’s entire social metaphor just so Black Adam and the Justice Society can team up to face a faceless bad guy in the final act. Considering how popular superhero satire like The Boys and Invincible have become, it’s disappointing that DC can’t let their “heroes” be the bad guys even just for one movie.

Once Black Adam leaves its politics firmly behind, all it has left are the generic checklist items that have sadly come to define the average superhero film. Considering its incredibly high budget, Black Adam’s CGI is laughably poor. It feels completely weightless in motion, which works during the instances where Black Adam is inflicting cartoon violence on his enemies by rocketing them into the stratosphere. But his confrontations against equally powered foes, like the Justice Society or the devilish supervillain Sabacc (Marwan Kenzari), suffer from having absolutely zero feel of kineticism or impact. And that’s during the sequences that are intelligible to begin with, as most of Black Adam is atrociously edited. Even the most basic of character interactions are edited into oblivion, endlessly cutting back and forth between Black Adam, his team of rebel allies, the entire Justice Society, the bad guys standing in the background, a potted plant, an interesting rock somebody found on the side of the road, et cetera. The film is so desperate to follow along every character’s response to plot/action beats that it often fails to clarify any character’s standing in a scene. Lastly, Black Adam is just plain ugly. The film is enveloped in Hollywood’s “Foreign Nation Yellow” color grading, which is not only hideous, but once again undermines its politics by Orientalizing Kahndaq’s landscapes and its people.

When a movie fails to capitalize on the aspects that should make it great, it only spotlights its mediocrities, which is exactly what has happened here with Black Adam. What should have been the RRR or Shin Godzilla of superhero movies, a film featuring an unstoppable force that bulldozes systems of oppression, has instead become yet another simplistic popcorn flick in the DCEU catalogue. Black Adam certainly clears the bar of entertainment, and it makes for a fun enough trip to the movie theater. So, in that regard, it isn’t as bad as movies like WW84 or Justice League (2017).

RATING: 2/5 STARS