Black Adam. A new DC moving first starring on Oct 21, 2022. A prequel to the 2019 “Shazam”. Sharing the same powers as Shazam. It may lead you to think about which hero copied who. Now, this is no ordinary movie, as it stars the one and only living boulder, Dwayne Johnson as the movie’s hero, Black Adam. The film explores the historical lore you won’t find in the original Shazam. Top critic Trace Sauver said this about the movie: “Black Adam is mostly a movie made up of strictly baseline ideas, or the regurgitation of already existing ones”. But you aren’t here to listen to his opinion. You’re here to listen to ours, so let’s get into it.
Black is a nonstop train of action scenes from beginning to end. Nonstop mortal combat like finishers and 1v100 fight scenes where the hero demolishes everyone in a matter of seconds. The movie’s biggest weakness was the plot and even the fight scenes that makeup 90 percent of the movie. Like most new hero movies, the directors demonstrate the hero’s power but have him defeat the “goons”, or just regular people equipped with guns. This is problem number one. They show him beating up these regular people too much. Though it is fun to see someone get tossed miles into the distance with a little effort as picking up a pencil, it gets old after happening for the 30th time.
The second weakness of the fight scenes is the duration of the important fights. They just don’t last long enough. The final fight was so short and uneventful that the build-up to arguably the most suspenseful moment of the whole movie felt like a waste of time. Warning, there are spoilers past this point. The real “heroes in the story are introduced early on once the threat of Black Adam is revealed, they enter the scene immediately to neutralize him. They spend the duration of the movie convincing him to renounce his powers, sometimes through brute force, though that never worked. The “heroes” also say that he is not a hero, which is an argument that follows itself in circles throughout the entire movie. This is where the problems with the plot start to show. Black Adam, after realizing he is no hero and only uses his powers to kill decided to voluntarily put himself into a state of suspended animation, forever.
At this point, the final villain is finally introduced in the last 15 minutes of the movie. Black Adam was just put into custody and had renounced his powers when it becomes very apparent that the initial “heroes” that forced Black Adam into suspended animation, the Justice Force, were no match for this villain and needed him to defeat him. In our opinion, they should have realized they couldn’t sooner. After all, if you can’t beat a buff guy with a lightning bolt on his chest then you can’t beat an actual hellspawn. So not 5 minutes after Black Adam was imprisoned, they called upon him to break out and come help them fight. So he recalled his powers and came to help…. But this time..he has a cape (he is a hero now). Black Adam was a little too powerful though, and as we said before, the villain didn’t last very long.
The movie initially has some solid ideas and poses great questions. A big one is: What does it mean to be a hero? A question pondered in the movie. But the answer never being fully found amidst all of the movie’s drama, the question is eventually forgotten. More at the beginning of the movie Black Adam stays more true to the comic version of himself. Making the Justice Force question themselves as they accuse him of being a villain for killing people. He constantly causes a tug-of-war of morals and sparks much controversy as he is the only person in the world who helped the people of Kahndaq as their Country has been “enslaved” and torn by war from other countries’ tyranny for years and no other “heroes” have stepped in to help them. Black Adam is the only one and then the real “heroes” only came to stop Black Adam, not the tyranny. This could have been a great setup for an amazing story. However, this debate quickly turns into everyone saying the same thing over and over again until the arguments become stale and the only arguments being made are just generic statements and it’s hard to tell who stands where on the matter.
Black Adam seems to do this a lot. Introduce interesting and intriguing ideas but never follows through with them. Another example is at the beginning of the movie, Black Adam is shot by a rocket made with Eternium. A geode that was introduced at the beginning of the movie as what made the final villain’s source of power. When this exploded near Black Adam, he was obviously wounded and eventually passed out. Eternium is the only thing introduced ever in this movie as Black Adam’s weakness and after that point, it’s never used again to immobilize him which kind of left us, the audience wondering: What’s the point?
All in all this movie was very mediocre and had a lot of unexplored ideas and left their audience hanging. It felt repetitive and bland. While it initially had some good ideas, it only scratched the surface and jam-packed the movie with recurring action scenes and mostly coasted on that. While at the end of the movie it felt that no real lesson or moral was taught. It ended in the same place it started. Our final score……5/10. The biggest takeaway is don’t make the Rock skinny (if you know you know)