Between A Rock and a Hard Place
Heroes don’t kill. Or at least that’s what Black Adam tells us, seemingly having forgotten that arguably this same universe’s most famous hero, Batman, himself was beating criminals to a bloody corpse not five years prior. That Black Adam is predicated on the will-he-won’t-he of Dwayne Johnson choosing good or evil should speak to the level of surprises in store with the DCEU’s latest superhero wank. It is, after all, The Rock we’re talking about here. We know who this man is. Or rather who he always present himself as. We’re hardwired at this point to know what kind of characters he (almost exclusively) plays and which he does not. He’s groomed beyond the point of being hairless. Family-friendly to the point where he’s never had a sexual interest in any movie that I can remember. The man is a walking, talking PR creation. Threateningly non-threatening. Only the clueless or culturally-apathetic will be left to wonder which way this is going to turn out. Spoiler alert, it’s just a matter of time before this ostensible antihero becomes a slave to the reluctant hero formula.
In that capacity, Johnson is miscast as the titular star of DC’s newest yarn. To attach a man known exclusively for “playing nice” is to neuter the character of the dark sparkle that Otto Binder and C. C. Beck’s 1945 comic book creation pines to possess. His performance does the character few favors – glowering and monotone, The Rock is cooking up the same thing that he always serves and you can smell the 2-star dish from a mile away. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Black Adam’s journey to the big screen makes sense – originally the character was to serve as the primary antagonist for Zachary Levi’s Shazam before The Rock insisted the character be privy to his own solo outing. When one of the biggest movie stars in the world demands their own superhero movie, who are the mere mortals at DC studios to say no? So what could be construed as a passion project for Johnson (who spent the better part of a decade in development on Black Adam) is probably better read as an ego trip. But if this is all the dimensionality you can mine from the character in his own feature length origin story, he’d have been better off as a thoroughbred villain.
Intermittently, the intrigue of Black Adam’s story surfaces. Theoretically, it’s about uprising and breaking the shackles of the oppressors. Taking cues from Wonder Woman, Black Adam begins with a prologue set in 2600 B.C.E. Shiruta, a made-up cypher for Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or any other country that the US has bombed over the last few decades. Actually choosing one of the aforementioned countries and setting the story there would have been a more interesting – and poignant – choice. But alas, Black Adam is as risk averse as its star. 5000 years ago, a boy-slave dares to defy a king and becomes an overnight symbol of revolution. Before the King can claim his head, the boy leader is Shazam’ed superpowers by a confederacy of wizards. His revenge is swift, Shiruta’s champion smashing the ancient patriarchy.
The thread of breaking oppression becomes more politically analogous to the real world when the story moves to the modern day. A “Middle Eastern” hero (Johnson’s ethnic ambiguity is stretched paper thin here) championing freedom against hegemonic enforcers while refusing to toe a moral line in the sand is an inherently interesting foil. What is actually done with the material, less so. When resistance fighter Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) and her hapless brother (Mohammed Amer) find the location of a lost magical crown, they accidentally awaken Teth-Adam (Johnson). His wrath is immediate. In this first scene spend with the long-slumbering super-being, we’re witness to the full extent of his powers. Lightning! Super speed! Indestructibility! He’s unreasonably strong, even for the DC universe. Matched only by the Last Son of Krypton. But, unlike Superman, Teth-Adam kills.
Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller (who never seems pleased to be contractually roped into these movies) is having none of it and dispatches the Justice League of America (whatever that is) to the Middle Eastern desert to quell this new threat. For all intents and purposes, the JLA may as well be Team America: World Police run through the superhero press. They arrive to stop the foreign champion from enacting his no-holds-barred from of justice only to meet the resistance of the local people who want their own defender. For decades, their nation’s needs have been an afterthought – these “heroes” only showing up to protect their own interest. Any attempt to actually frame Black Adam around a historically-oppressed, developing nation needing their own champion (*cough* WMD *cough*) rather than be at the mercy of a global superpower eventually bends the knee to the demands of boilerplate superheroics and IP manicuring. That is to say, Black Adam seemingly forgets that it’s trying to say something and offers instead some punchy punches and pew-pew.
Something that the DCEU is very comfortable with is introducing an entire new team of characters in a single movie rather than parceling things out like Marvel does with their entire phase strategy. Black Adam is no exception. The film from screenwriters Rory Haines, Sohrab Noshirvani, and Adam Sztykiel drop in both a new organization, the JLA, whose ties to the other Justice League remain a mystery, and their four members. There’s Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), an ultra-wealthy idealist who wears a gilded suit with extending wings and a rather impractical hawk-mask; Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), a psychic wizard with an alien helmet that lets him see the future; Atom-Smasher (Noah Centineo) the DCEU carbon-copy of Ant-Man who inherited his suit from a related predecessor that allows his to get really, really big; and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) whose name not only recalls Storm but so too do her powers. We learn almost nothing else about these characters, how they came to form the JLA, and what their relationship to each other is beyond Hawkman and Doctor Fate’s continuing to call each other “old friend.” They are so thinly-drawn that we’re left to fill in the details through genre osmosis; it’s safe to just apply whatever blanket origin story you think fits and move along.
One of the genre’s most bland villain and vague Macguffins follow suit accompanied by a plethora of needle drops that are as awkward as they are uninspired – The Stones’ “Paint it Black” rub up against Kanye’s “Power” (a crude choice considering the controversy-ridden stars’ recent anti-semitic tirade). No one man should have all the power indeed. The fight scenes are a dizzying blur of CGI and slo-mo, a fixture of Zach Snyder’s dimly-lit comic book-faithful aesthetic to the TikTok-generation attention span. It’s truly an amalgamation made in digital hell. And yet, for all its faults, Black Adam is not an abject failure: there’s just too many interesting nuggets buried in here to dismiss the film entirely. That’s to say, it could have been worse but it’s still not very good.
CONCLUSION: Dwayne Johnson’s ‘Black Adam’ doesn’t shake up the DCEU so much as add another shaky layer to the universe’s confusion. As a standalone film, ‘Black Adam’ sloppily borrows ideas from the slate of other, better superhero movies, making for a slovenly antihero feature that can’t honestly commit to actually being bad.
C-
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