Black Adam (2022)

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.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

If you were to take a blend of things that I specifically enjoy – Humphrey Bogart, movies based on theme park rides, The Mummy, dad jokes, Pirates of the Caribbean – you might end up with a movie like Jungle Cruise. However, in this case, the sum of the parts is so much more than the whole, with a film that ends up feeling noted to death and assembled by committee. Jungle Cruise is never quite terrible, but it docks somewhere south of watchable.

In search of a mythical flower that will end human suffering, Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) defies contemporary skepticism and commissions the sardonic skipper Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to ferry her and her brother (Jack Whitehall) up the Amazon River. Along the way, the trio is pursued by a cursed Spanish conquistador (Édgar Ramirez), a maniacal German prince (Jesse Plemons), and a harbormaster (Paul Giamatti) to whom Frank is deeply in debt.

 

At some point in Jungle Cruise – and this moment will vary for moviegoers – you’ll be reminded of a better movie that you’d rather be watching. Perhaps it’s early on, when the film’s opening flashback sequence and initial historical setting remind you of the structure of Stephen Sommers’s masterful Mummy. Perhaps you’ll pick up on the Bogart-esque performance of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (which is actually somewhat decent, inflected as it is by, above all, The African Queen). Or perhaps it’s the film’s second half, with cursed zombie conquistadors who seem airlifted from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself recognizing some of Frank Wolff’s deliberately bad jokes and wish that you were on the Jungle Cruise ride proper. At any rate, it is impossible to watch Jungle Cruise and think this is the best version of any of its disparate parts. 

 

Despite drawing on such a wealth of source material and creative influences, Jungle Cruise all too often feels like it’s pulling its punches. The key, for example, to why the corny jokes work so well on the ride is because the skippers believe in the punchline and deliver it with a knowing wink. Here, Johnson seems to want to remain above the jokes, delivering them deadpan but almost begrudgingly, knowing yet not really caring that some true believers want to hear about “the backside of water.” Ditto the winks to Albert Falls and Trader Sam, legendary figures in Disney Parks lore but almost inconsequential easter eggs here. Where Johnson cuts a passable Bogart for about half the film, Emily Blunt is a disappointing remix of Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn Carnahan from The Mummy, lacking the charm and wit in favor of a corporately cynical “girlboss” attitude. And as seriously as the film takes itself, it’s continually deflated by the fact that no one can pronounce the Spanish word “lágrimas” correctly. (It’s got an accent mark for a reason.)

 

While the first half of the film is essentially a theme park remake of The African Queen, peppered with enough inside references to keep fans from walking out, the second half is a disappointing retread of the Pirates movies. Édgar Ramirez and his crew of conquistadors seem airlifted from the disparate ghost zombie crews of Hector Barbossa, Davy Jones, and Armando Salazar. Some of these phantasms are merged with plant life, others with insects or snakes, to the point where they may as well be leftover CGI creations that weren’t used in the final cuts of the Pirates films. I don’t know quite how you make a narrative film out of a plotless ride like Jungle Cruise – perhaps focusing more on the Jungle Navigation Co. or on Albert Awol (if you know, you know) – but I don’t think that cribbing the successful Pirates formula is the most satisfying way to go.

 

If the plot feels like it’s grafted together from impressions of its predecessors, the cast certainly all feel like they’re starring in different movies. Johnson is somewhat slick but never quite breaks free of his own star persona; if he’d committed to the Bogart of it all, or embraced the hammy humor, it could have been a breakout franchise performer like Johnny Depp’s impossibly popular Captain Jack Sparrow. Blunt too seems bored by most of the film, trying not to overdo the stuffy bluster but never quite landing anywhere. Then there are the three strangest performances in the film – Jack Whitehall as Lily’s brother, Jesse Plemons as Prince Joachim of Prussia (a real person, mind you), and Paul Giamatti as a dock owner who seems to have wandered in from a Saturday Night Live skit. Whitehall plays MacGregor extremely broadly, accessing a Forrest Gump level of caricature, even as the film only winks and nods in the direction of his sexuality. Plemons is clearly having arch fun as a Germanic villain, but he’s so transcendently unreal that one loses focus on the film every time he appears. (This performance was but an appetizer for the sheer historical stupidity on display later that year in The King’s Man.)

 

Then there’s Paul Giamatti, who seems to understand how silly the film is and so brings the right level of ham to his performance. Yet no one else in the film is operating at his level, which makes him look more like a cartoon character than the computer-generated jaguar that prowls around the film. Particularly as a gifted character performer in the vein of, say, the Universal monster films, Giamatti shines a light on just how incongruous Jungle Cruise manages to be, a collection of parts and bits from five different writers who never seem to be on the same page. Indeed, just about the only thing in the movie that works is a mid-film twist that I genuinely did not see coming, yet this shift in the plot ends up veering the film into another strange and unexpected direction. Perhaps Jungle Cruise is like the Amazon River itself, swirling and winding in unpredictable ways, with too many voices arguing over how best to navigate it. 

 

Jungle Cruise is rated PG-13 for “sequences of adventure violence.” Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Written by Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, John Norville, and Josh Goldstein. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Édgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, and Paul Giamatti.

Monster March II: The Mummy Returns (2001)

For as much as I love The Mummy – and as much as I loved The Mummy Returns when it came out in 2001 – I haven’t seen it all the way through in many years, and its fortunes only waned in the intervening decades. By the time I got back to The Mummy Returns, after watching all the Universal Classic Monsters films and seeing the 1999 film more times than I can count, The Mummy Returns is so ephemeral, so underwhelming, that it’s hard to believe these are the same filmmakers.

With their ten-year-old son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow, adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his archeologist wife (Rachel Weisz) accidentally trigger a chain reaction that will awaken the slumbering Scorpion King (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose ancient army threatens to destroy the world. Meanwhile, the mummified high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected by the reincarnation of his lost love Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), who wants the power of the Scorpion King for herself.

 

Here’s the thing about The Mummy Returns – Brendan Fraser is having so much fun that it’s very easy to overlook the fact that this film isn’t really very good at all. The first film was lightning in a bottle, clipping along without any dead weight and taking itself seriously enough that the audience could play along too. The Mummy Returns is, plainly put, bonkers; very little of it makes sense outside of the immediate scene you’re watching, and while it does obey its own internal logic, it’s akin to the logic of a dream, where details only connect if you force them together.

 

The Mummy Returns is full of, for lack of a better word, stuff. There’s a trio of brigands who never accomplish their disparate missions before Imhotep summarily dispatches them; an indestructible hot air balloon; a tribe of shrunken-head pygmy mummies; a sinister museum curator who never does any curating; an implicit prophecy regarding Rick O’Connell’s destiny; and no fewer than two distinct reincarnation subplots, neither of which fazes anyone in the film. These are all things that occur, in roughly this order, and no one comments on the fact that these things simply happen. I suppose that, after the events of The Mummy, these characters are well and truly prepared for anything, yet it’s hard to fathom anyone simply accepting this many unexplained phenomena in the span of one week. Recall that everything spectacular in The Mummy came back to Imhotep; here, there are so many supernatural forces jousting that the plot feels like a staged production at Pharoahic Times. 

 

So the plot doesn’t make much sense, a collection of bits rather than an integrated narrative, but I’m not entirely sure that one comes to a mummy film with “coherent plot” high on the list. The action sequences are a notch better than the ones in the adventure-heavy Mummy, and it seems we can’t go fifteen minutes without something spectacular happening on screen. As much of an intellectual chore as the movie can become, requiring leaps of logic and credulity, the action scenes are well-staged, particularly an early banger in which the crew are accosted by mummies aboard a double-decker bus. This flavor of action doesn’t align with the gee-whiz thrills of the first film, but it’s respectably dynamic and worth rewatching out of context. So too the pygmy mummy attack, which makes not a lick of sense in the structure of the film and has no real purpose for being there, but which is nevertheless suitably creepy and electrifying on its own merits.

 

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Mummy Returns is that it is never quite a mummy movie. Imhotep’s reanimation and revivification feels perfunctory, designed to move the character as quickly as possible into position as a comic book supervillain. As much as the film outfits itself with the trappings of reincarnation and dynastic Egypt, it has no larger theme or purpose for these matters beyond the fact that they were principal concerns of the first film. The Mummy Returns is a cliché of a sequel, doing it all over again but only a little bit differently – and losing so much of the magic in the process. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a gag near the climax in which young Alex struggles to read the hieroglyph “Amenophus”; Jonathan gleefully reminds us that he too had the same problem in the first film. But beyond the surface-level pleasure of remembering better days, The Mummy Returns is serving only lukewarm leftovers.

 

Put another way, The Mummy remains one of my favorite films of all time, yet The Mummy Returns is little better than a footnote, as if to say, “Oh, yes, and they made another one, too.”

 

The Mummy Returns is rated PG-13 for “adventure action and violence.” Written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo, Oded Fehr, Patricia Velasquez, Freddie Boath, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Moana (2016)

While Disney is remaking and reinscribing their classic animated fare with varying degrees of success (from Maleficent to The Jungle Book, the results have been a mixed bag), they’re simultaneously churning out what can best be described as revisionist fairy tales in which Disney can be seen to rewrite its gender politics vis-à-vis the “happily-ever-after through true love” narrative. (Zootopia might even fit in here, though from here Big Hero 6 seems to fit better with the Marvel movies.) Moana certainly fits in the latter camp beside Tangled and Frozen, and while I wasn’t as bowled over by Moana as I was by Frozen, Moana is still a fine offering.

Fueled by a longing to take to the seas, young Moana (newcomer Aul’i Cravalho) bristles against her father’s insistence that she stick to her island roots and prepare to lead her people as their chief. But with the gentle encouragement of her grandmother, Moana discovers another destiny, one that leads her to the exiled demigod Maui (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and his own begrudging quest for restitution.

Your mileage, as ever, may vary, but perhaps because the bar has been set so high of late by Disney, Moana did not knock me out. Last month I returned from a few days in Walt Disney World, so maybe it’s the fact that I’d very recently mainlined the magic of the mouse, or perhaps it was the burden of expectation (always a dangerous thing to carry into a movie theater) based on precedent and extant reviews. Heck, maybe I’d been jaded by the dispiriting array of trailers on tap before Moana. Or maybe it’s just that Moana is good but not great. Maybe, in the words of Captain McCluskey, “I’m getting too old for my job... too grouchy.”

I did like it, but the superlatives aren’t there for me to purge like so much ipecac. I enjoyed the soundtrack in the moment, though I didn’t leave the theater humming any of the tunes; I laughed at the jokes, but I can’t say that I could repeat any of them for you. What did impress me mostly began with the letter C – Cravalho, coconuts, the chicken, and a crustacean. And the tattoos.

Time will tell whether Cravalho becomes a major star or not (remember, the voice of Mulan now has a regular spot on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD), but she acquits herself well in her debut feature in a part that feels written to play to her strengths – her determination, her singing prowess, and her ability to keep pace with the more seasoned voices in the cast. While I never fully dissociated Maui from the man I knew to be voicing him, Cravalho inhabits Moana with aplomb and breathes life into her.

The plot of the film can be loosely described as a Polynesian Odyssey, with a series of episodic adventures along a sea voyage on a mission from the gods. In these adventures, we meet a seafaring band of pirate coconuts (or is that coconut pirates?) who are equal parts adorable and terrifying, a fine feat of visual design and wordless storytelling. Then there’s the mad chicken Heihei (voiced, surprisingly, by the dulcet clucks of Alan Tudyk), who almost steals the show with his dimwitted struts and well-timed mishaps. Rounding out a kind of trinity of fascinating creatures (or, put another way, “fantastic beasts”), we have Jemaine Clement as the klepto crab Tamatoa, who gets a fun musical number in which to express his offbeat sensibility while serving as a kind of Joseph Campbell’s gatekeeper for a literal sword-in-the-stone moment.

Lastly, if I wasn’t knocked out by Maui himself, his tattoos are quite impressive, hand-animated amid the computer cartoonery that is the film’s milieu. Indeed, it’s little surprise that the film’s directors have had a hand in many of Disney’s last twenty years of animated films, especially because Maui’s tattoos recall the Grecian aesthetics of Hercules back in 1997, a film I remember fondly. These semi-sentient tattoos continue the coconuts’ good work of silent storytelling, drawing on the bulging biceps and swirling linework of Hercules to great effect. Maui seems irritated by their rebellious approach to his own self-mythmaking, but it’s an audience delight to see a hole poked in the demigod’s bluster

I have nothing bad to say about Moana, except to say that I have nothing tremendous to say about Moana, which feels a bit like the movie review equivalent of a “first world problem.” Moana is the very model of reliable entertainment, steady on course for Disney, even if the effect is more that of a pleasant dream – left with a good feeling but without the lasting memory that would accompany something a little more substantive.

Moana is rated PG for “peril, some scary images and brief thematic elements.” Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Written by Jared Bush, Ron Clements, John Musker, Chris Williams, Don Hall, Pamela Ribon, and Aaron & Jordan Kandell. Songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Foa’i. Starring Auli’i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson.

Bonus review! Moana is preceded by the short film “Inner Workings,” which is very much the half-remembered dream equivalent of the immaculate Inside Out. Here, a man’s internal organs react to the drudgery of office work, the temptations of the beach, and the overwhelming urge to micturate. It’s clever but ephemeral, perhaps hampered by the protagonist’s uncanny resemblance to Carl Fredrickson from Up, and it never arrives at the depth of concept or feeling that Inside Out did. But it’s cute and doesn’t overstay its welcome.