While DC Comics has been the elder statesman of the publishing world, having virtually invented the superhero genre with Superman in 1938, Marvel Comics positioned itself in the Swingin’ 60s as the scrappy underdog, even as its sales began to outstrip its “Distinguished Competition.” Not so in the world of the box office, where Marvel’s stock continues to rise, raking in the big bucks despite (in this critic’s estimation) creatively lackluster fare of late; DC, meanwhile, has struggled to get its act together, firing then rehiring its flagship director while losing studio heads and repeatedly scrapping and reconfiguring plans for an extended cinematic universe. DC lacks, it would seem, a central creative captain, a Kevin Feige to guide their ships. (The two leading contenders, Zack Snyder and Geoff Johns, have seen their fortunes wax and wane at parent company Warner Brothers.)
Has DC Comics found its cinematic savior in Dwayne Johnson? The internet seems to have anointed him so, even if critics are less impressed with his DC debut as the titular Black Adam. What is clear is that Johnson is DC’s most vocal hype man, funneling all his powers from his pro wrestling days, and one wonders if the price of Black Adam’s existence is Johnson’s reliance on his own star power.
Johnson stars as Teth-Adam, an ancient champion who fell in battle during the twilight of Kahndaq’s golden age. Centuries later, Teth-Adam is awakened into a world he no longer recognizes, prompting Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) to assemble a new Justice Society to keep the champion in line; he and his old comrade Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan) are joined by newcomers Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who find that Teth-Adam will be somewhat less than accommodating to the heroes of this world.
Fans and insiders have been waiting for this movie since its initial announcement in 2007 – and even before then, ever since the moment that some comics fan first noticed that the Black Adam comic book character looks a bit like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It’s perhaps another indicator of how much trouble DC has had getting its properties on the big screen. (For context, 2007 was a year before The Dark Knight [and Iron Man] and a year after V for Vendetta, with not much else in the neighborhood.) And for months now, Johnson has been repeating the self-aware catchphrase, now memed into immortality, that “the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change,” while simultaneously teasing that a showdown between himself and Henry Cavill’s Superman isn’t far off.
And so it is impossible to watch Black Adam without being acutely aware of how forcefully insistent Johnson’s own personality has been in the creation and promotion of the film. Consequently, it is never quite Black Adam we see on the screen; it is always Dwayne Johnson picking fights and calling out antagonists, carving out his own franchise and demanding that the audience see him as the bringer of justice and the whetter of appetites. That the film features numerous sequences of bystanders chanting, “Long live the champion!” only furthers my belief that the movie is as much a love letter to Johnson as it is to the character he portrays.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra, late of the uninspiring Jungle Cruise, returns to partner with Johnson, and while this film acquits itself a little more holistically than the theme park adaptation, there is still the sense of disparate parts never quite coalescing into a whole. The Justice Society, for example, boasts a roster of dozens in the source material, yet the film’s version feels cobbled together – quite literally, in an introductory sequence where Hawkman picks his team members with all the enthusiasm of dealing four playing cards from the top of a shuffled deck. Consequently, there’s never a sense that the Justice Society has any sort of an arc, save for Brosnan’s Doctor Fate (maybe); instead, their scenes come off as though Collet-Serra picked four action figures and threw them against his favorite toy. Put another way, you could sub in Wildcat or Stargirl, The Sandman or Liberty Belle, and the effect would be the same, giving the film the kind of careless team dynamic that marked early 2000s superhero films, which treated characters only as trademarked names recognizable to the initiated.
Then there’s the continuity detritus that Collet-Serra interposes, ostensibly to elicit a cheer from an audience who recognizes the references. Viola Davis video-chats into the film in a few scenes, suggesting that if the hierarchy of the DC Universe has indeed changed, it’s put her morally ambiguous (yet perfectly cast) Amanda Waller at the top of the heap. Elsewhere, Jennifer Holland reprises her role as Emilia Harcourt, wedding the film firmly to the dismal James Gunn iteration of The Suicide Squad. Meanwhile, Djimon Hounsou appears as the wizard Shazam, reminding audiences that this all started, more or less, with 2019’s Shazam! And while one character’s bedroom is adorned with the recognizable artwork of Jim Lee and Ivan Reis, one figure of note appears in a mid-credits sequence; I won’t spoil it, but it’d be a small miracle if you hadn’t already heard of this.
All of this is to say that the film is so distractingly composed to declare, “Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing,” so focused on projecting a corporate confidence, that it never quite finds its own feet as a narrative proper. Callbacks and references do not a shared universe make, nor does the peculiar brand of hero worship we see in Black Adam. Robert Downey Jr. waited until Iron Man 2 to appear alongside a standing ovation for himself; perhaps Johnson might have done better to wait for his sequel before anointing himself ruler, protector, and champion of the DC Universe.
Yet if anything sobered my take on Black Adam, it was hearing the little kids leaving the theater behind me, shouting onomatopoeias at each other and assuring one another, “That was awesome!” I know I’ve written a version of that sentence before, acknowledging that I’m getting older and maybe I’ve seen all of this before and grown jaded by it. So if the DC Universe belongs to the next generation, God bless them. And indeed, there were some very solid eyeball kicks to be had in Black Adam – Teth-Adam hurling his enemies into the sky, Atom Smasher enlarging himself and bumping into things, and the special effects bonanza of the film’s climax. It was all quite fine, and if others loved it more, a rising tide lifts all ships in this genre. Roll on, Adam v Whomever; I’m on board for whatever comes next.
Black Adam is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence, intense action and some language.” Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Written by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani. Based on the DC Comics by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Quintessa Swindell, and Pierce Brosnan.
