Black Adam Isn't Great... But I Can Fix It.
For the first time since ending Out of Frame, I went to see a movie today that I actually wanted to review: DC’s newest entry into its cinematic universe, Black Adam.
Note: There will be spoilers in this review, but I’m going to try to limit them to later in the piece. You’ll know when we get there.
Big picture: I have mixed feelings about this film.
There were some good elements, but ultimately, I think — like most of DC’s films — Black Adam is a pretty convoluted story that’s generally overstuffed with characters and plot beats that director Jaume Collet-Serra (Jungle Cruise, House of Wax) and writers, Adam Sztykiel (Rampage), Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani couldn’t really manage to wrangle.
The Plot.
The basic story is that roughly 5,000 years ago, a prosperous civilization was overtaken by an evil ruler, Anh-Kot, who enslaved his people and used them to dig for a magical substance called “Eternium”. Anh-Kot’s goal was to find enough of this material to turn it into the powerful “Crown of Sabbac”, which would imbue him with the powers of the ancient world’s most horrifying demons.
In order to prevent this great evil from releasing hell on earth, the Council of Wizards (ie. Djimon Hounsou from Shazam!) appoint a young boy — unbroken by slavery and not afraid to stand up to the tyrannical king — as their champion, giving him the combined powers of the ancient gods, including strength, invulnerability, flight, speed, and lightning magic. But according to local Kandaqi legend, once Anh-Kot was defeated, the champion mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again… Until now.
Cut to: Modern-day Kandaq.
It’s still kind of a terrible place to be, reminiscent of Libya or Jordan, but instead of being ruled by a ruthless king, it’s been overrun by Intergang (DC’s largest and most well-organized criminal enterprise). Here, we meet Amon Tomaz (Bodhi Sabongui) and his mother Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), who is some kind of scientist (possibly a linguist? Historian? Folklorist? The movie never really says!) looking to find the MacGuffin Crown of Sabbac before Intergang can get their hands on it.
In the fight to keep the Crown out of Intergang’s hands, Adrianna ends up opening some kind of tomb, bringing Teth Adam (aka Black Adam — Dwayne Johnson) into the present day, where he immediately rains down abject destruction on the men attacking her in a scene of impressive brutality.
Black Adam’s murderous display of power attracts the attention of Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) who calls in a heretofore-unknown superhero team called the Justice Society of America, led by Carter Hall (aka Hawkman, played by Aldis Hodge) and Kent Nelson (Dr. Fate, played by Pierce Brosnan), along with new team members Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Cetineo) to neutralize him.
Hijinks ensue.
We’ll get into more of that in a second, but first, here’s…
What I liked about the film:
I thought that pretty much the whole Justice Society of America, and particularly Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate and Aldis Hodget as Hawkman, was great. They largely embodied the kind of idealism of superheroes that the Justice League should have exhibited, and even without any character development — which was badly needed across the board here — I got a sense of who each of the characters are and it felt like there was some history there.
(Most of) the film’s design and aesthetic, while generally just consistent with other pre-existing DCEU films, was excellent. The look and feel of Teth (aka Black) Adam’s powers are a kind of combination of elements we’ve seen in Man of Steel, Justice League, and Shazam!, but the design really captures a raw, dangerous, unpredictable element that Marvel’s style has never really had. It’s a real high point for DC and a differentiator between the tones of the two franchises that I hope they keep.
I also liked the fact that Black Adam is — essentially for the whole movie — a pretty bad guy, as he should be. That said, and we’ll talk about this later as well, the writers try really hard to get the audience to see him as a hero.
Lastly, there was actually an interesting set-up to a discussion about the nature of interventionism and how different cultures are likely to see inconsistently offered “help'“ coming from ultrapowerful foreign agents. The film could have used a lot more of that, but I appreciate that they brought it up.
Unfortunately, the list of things I didn’t like about it is a little longer and more important.
What I Didn’t Like:
Firstly, the film simply has way too much going on, and doesn’t use its runtime particularly well.
For example, instead of using the opening 10-20 minutes to directly introduce us to Teth Adam and get a sense of his character and what life was like in the village (city state? country?) of Kandaq several millennia ago, we get narrated exposition and surprisingly heartless montage of conscripts digging for some mineral we don’t really care about.
The problem with this is that this backstory is literally the most important thing when it comes to the audience understanding who Adam is and why he has an extreme disregard for human life. I’ll get back to this in the spoilers section, because it’s actually a really good aspect of the story, but its execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Sadly… Good ideas, poorly executed is a fairly consistent theme of the film.
I’m also not a fan of the casting. Black Adam’s CGI physicality aside, and in spite of the fact that the film probably could never have been made without him, I think Dwayne Johnson was totally wrong for this role.
He’s an actor with a pretty limited range, and as someone who has traded on natural charisma and good natured mugging for the camera for most of his career, he just doesn’t have the emotional presence to play a character who is motivated by trauma, pain, and the need for revenge.
Likewise, the film attempts a parallel between the young “hero” we meet in ancient Kandaq and the modern-day kid Amon who is largely Adam’s entry point into modern society, but Amon was a silly character who made very little sense and sadly the young actor who played him, Bodhi Sabongui, just wasn’t very good.
But a lot of the problem with the film is simply the writing itself, and this gets us into the reason I would have talked about this film on an episode of Out of Frame were I still making that show — and I think now we have to move into spoilers.
SPOILERS START HERE
In order to do what Black Adam wanted to do, the writers had an immense amount of material to cram into what was even a relatively long (124 minute) runtime.
They had to: 1) Introduce Kandaq, its history, and its current problems with Intergang; 2) Introduce Black Adam and explain his 5,000 year old backstory; 3) Show us how he got his powers; 4) Give us a good reason why he’s vengeful and ready to murder countless people; 5) Introduce the Dr. Fate, Hawkman, Cyclone, and Atom Smasher; 6) Introduce and explain modern-day Kandaq, its political history, and the current situation with Intergang; 7) Introduce Adrianna and Amon Tomaz, Adrianna’s brother, and Ishmael — their friend who ultimately ends up taking the Crown of Sabbac for himself; and of course 8) we have to know about the Crown of Sabbac, what it is, why it is, and what it does… Plus we have to 9) Give a reason for JSA to fight Black Adam; 10) Find a way for them to actually defeat him and send him to one of Taskforce X’s secret prisons;11) Introduce yet another villain! 12) Have the JSA fight and fail to defeat the new villain, leading to; 13) Break Black Adam out of prison so he can fight the new villain instead; 14) SKY BEAM!
…It’s a lot.
I’m not necessarily saying it couldn’t have all been done, but this movie certainly didn’t do it.
Instead, we got a whole lot of really clunky exposition (even bringing back some dossier style intros of the JSA, sorta like what the first Suicide Squad did), and very little actual character development.
Worse still, the one bit of real backstory we did get for Black Adam himself was a major twist towards the end of the 2nd Act where it’s revealed that he was not — in fact — the original “champion” that the Council of Wizards entrusted with their powers.
Teth Adam’s son was the courageous young “hero” who became the Wizards’ champion.
Teth Adam gains his powers secondhand after assassins attempted to kill him and succeeded in killing his wife. Teth’s champion son gives him same powers the Council of Wizards gave him, much as Shazam gives his foster siblings powers in Shazam!
Unfortunately, in order to do that, Teth’s son had to change back to his vulnerable “real” human form and in the brief moment that happened during the power transfer, he was killed by the king’s assassins, leaving Teth Adam bereft and without a family, but with freshly-granted unlimited power and unbridled rage.
As compelling as this backstory is, it’s just not the kind of emotional journey The Rock seems to be capable of presenting as an actor.
Not for one second did I buy that Dwayne Johnson was a grieving, rageful father; or that his indifference to killing was a testament to his disregard for the value of his own life and his anger at how he was treated thousands of years ago. It just didn’t work for me at all.
And yet, in spite of not only this backstory, but also countless examples of Adam ruthlessly murdering people, the movie is weirdly desperate for us to still see him as a “hero”.
Black Adam’s Moral Bankruptcy.
The actual message of Black Adam is absolutely terrible, and… I can think of two specific reasons why this happened.
Woke ideology ham-fistedly crammed into the movie; and
The desire to make “The Rock” an on-screen hero, regardless of his actions.
Let’s start with the “woke” element, because it’s actually a very minor part of the film and almost brief enough to miss, but the religious ideology has an almost limitless ability to ruin whatever it touches even in the smallest doses, so we need to talk about it.
One of the very first lines of non-narrated dialogue in the film is spoken by the young boy Amon Tomaz. For some inexplicable reason Amon rides a skateboard absolutely everywhere he goes (city streets, down the halls in his apartment building, using a skateboard as a makeshift zipline to get away from bad guys… you name it), and he happens to be stopped at one of Intergang’s various checkpoints throughout the city when we first meet him.
While detained (by an Intergang security guard he’s obviously had numerous previous interactions with), Amon distracts the guard by delivering a speech about Intergang’s “Imperialism” that belongs in the Facebook group “Out of all the things that didn’t happen, this didn’t happen the most.”
We learn that the point of the speech was actually to allow his mother, smuggled in a van also stopped at the checkpoint, to get through without being discovered, but the speech itself also established a core ideological argument that the movie comes back to again and again about how Kandaq’s thousands of years of problems are all the result of outside forces “oppressing their people and stealing all their resources”.
It’s not that the core premise is even necessarily bad conceptually. A lot of parts of the world are awful today because of a history of Imperialist plunder… Though it is also absurd to assume that every terrible part of the world must be the result of some external force, rather than a consequence of the political philosophies supported by the local population.
The real problem is that in this context, it doesn’t make any sense.
Intergang isn’t an imperial power. It’s a criminal organization that generally doesn’t want anyone to know they’re committing crimes, so the idea that they would have “checkpoints” seems to be a massive contrivance and a way to almost, but definitely not-really make the “imperialism” speech make a modicum of sense.
The only reason I can think of to go this direction at all is because the writers wanted to insert an “important issue” into the story, and this is the one that fits the setting of a vaguely Middle Eastern / North African nation.
Regardless, no 12-year-old boy has ever talked like this in the history of the world.
But 44 year old, pretentious Hollywood writers do.
Narratively, it also (in conjunction with the need to “redeem” Black Adam so that The Rock is always a good guy) gives a justification for the film’s ultimately warped sense of morality, absolving Teth of any moral guilt over callously murdering hundreds of people.
They were Imperialist swine! So they deserve to die.
The irony of all this is that the story actually works better if the bad guys are just Intergang thugs and if Black Adam does have a sense of actual justice, but he uses brutal methods as a byproduct of rage and his 5,000 year old “eye for an eye” mentality.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the film spends so much of its time having Black Adam fight the JSA that it never bothers to actually set up the final boss of the movie: A descendant of Anh-Kot who wants to use the Crown of Sabbac to turn himself into an all-powerful demon, releasing the dead from hell and making Kandaq “great” again.
Get it?
I have literally no idea how any of that makes sense, and it’s all stuffed into the last 30 minutes of the film, so I don’t think the writers know either.
In any case, it’s just all too much, and in the end, the message of the film is quite literally that “sometimes we need mass murderers to do the things that groups like the JSA will not” if we want to fight injustice.
Adrianna scolds Hawkman, saying that if the JSA wouldn’t step in to “do something” about Intergang and the longer history of Imperialism that has plagued Kandaq for generations, then maybe what they really need is a “protector” who has no problem throwing people into the sun or disintegrating them with a lightning bolt until their charred and crumbling skeleton is all that’s left. He’s the real hero here!
Ugh.
No. Black Adam is not a hero. Nor is he an “anti-hero” at this point. And I can’t think of a worse lesson to spread around the world right now than the idea that lethal violence in the name of “social justice” is a good thing if it gets results.
The ends do not justify the means.
So… How Would I Fix This?
There’s a good story in here, and I don’t actually think it would have taken that much work to find it. Here are a few thoughts on how this could have been dramatically better:
Recast Teth (aka Black) Adam with an actor with significantly greater emotional range than The Rock. I’d say that Mark Strong would have been a good choice, except that he was already in Shazam! as Dr. Sivana.
Show us his backstory instead of “telling” it to us — and not as a “twist”. We should have gotten 15-20 minutes at the beginning of the film that introduced us to Kandaq, circa 3,000 BCE. Imagine Kandaq as a prosperous society that has a history of being attacked by invaders, whose king (Anh-Kot) becomes obsessed with creating a magical crown that will give him the power to defend his country… But whose obsession ultimately leads him to become a tyrant, enslaving people like Teth Adam and his family.
Everything else can play out the way that it does with Teth’s son inspiring an uprising and attracting the attention of the Council of Wizards, gaining powers and deposing the king just as he’s about to succeed in creating the Crown of Sabbac.
This success is beloved by some of the people, but also results in the king’s acolytes discovering who the Wizards’ champion actually is and sending assassins to kill his family — at which point, the mother and son are killed and Teth is given powers he should never have had.
Teth vows revenge and becomes the embodiment of wrath, destroying the king, his acolytes, and causing immense destruction in the process, ultimately leading to the Council of Wizards imprisoning him in a Kandaqi temple for eternity.
CUT TO:Modern day Kandaq. The historical tragedy of the place is that King Anh-Kot never gained the power to defend the country, and the Wizard’s champion disappeared just at the moment that he might have been able to help defend the country and keep it free at the same time… So today, Kandaq is a product of invaders and instability, and is now controlled by a criminal cartel — that’s quite realistic, but it doesn’t need to be the main focal point of any particular plot beat past Act I. Instead, Intergang’s thuggery is just a backdrop. We can also establish that part of the reason they’re in Kandaq is because of its concentration of Eternium, which can be used for all sorts of weaponry and tech they want to create.
Adrianna needs to be clearly established as a historian / activist whose core goal is to protect Kandaq’s antiquities and Eternium from Intergang. We meet Adrianna’s son Amon, who is still a parallel to Teth Adam’s boy, but not annoying, and we meet Ishmael, who is one of Adrianna’s cohorts with a shared motivation to protect Kandaq from Intergang’s rapaciousness. Maybe they’re even dating or have a romantic connection.
In one of the old temples of Kandaq, Adrianna and Ishmael find the mythical Crown of Sabbac and Intergang shows up to take it. They threaten to kill Ishmael unless Adrianna gives up the treasure, but Adrianna finds an inscription in their ancient language that she invokes, releasing Teth Adam from his eternal prison.
VIOLENCE AND CARNAGE ENSUES!Eventually, an Eternium bomb knocks out Black Adam, so Adrianna, Amon, and Ishmael grab him before Intergang does and take him to Adrianna’s home, believing him to be their ticket to stopping Intergang.
Meanwhile, at Hawkman’s estate, we meet the Justice Society of America. Dr. Fate, Hawkman, Cyclone, and new guy, Atom Smasher. As we’re taking a break from the dramatic action in Kandaq, we show who all these characters are through their interactions. Dr. Fate is powerful, wise, and cryptic. Hawkman is the tactical leader… a nigh-indestructible alien from the warrior planet of Thanagar who has lived on Earth for centuries. Cyclone is a young genius who we later learn gained her powers as a result of a mad scientist’s experiment. Atom Smasher is the nephew of a previous hero by the same name, looking to prove he can live up to his uncle’s legacy.
Dr. Fate has a vision of a future involving Black Adam and demonic evil, but the vision isn’t perfectly clear. At the same moment, Hawkman — who routinely monitors global threats and is generally on high alert for Intergang in Kandaq — learns that something bad is happening. So he and Dr. Fate (Amanda Waller does not need to be involved here) mobilize their team to go stop Black Adam.Back in Kandaq, Adam wakes up and meets Amon. There’s a good amount of bonding and fish out of water awkwardness as he learns about the modern world and has a few moments to see the brave young Amon through the eyes of a father, instead of just being a rage-fueled monster.
But then… Intergang attacks, kidnapping Amon (who has the crown), and oh boy… it is back on!
Black Adam’s rage intensifies, feeling the pain of losing a son again. But as he’s going to hunt Intergang down to get Amon back, the JSA arrives, not fully understanding the situation but knowing that Adam is destroying the city. They must stop him.
MORE CHAOS!In the commotion, Amon drops the Crown, which the JSA picks up.
Adrianna knows that they need the Crown to get Amon back, and although she mostly sides with Black Adam, she brokers a peace with JSA, trying to get them to work together to get her son back. Black Adam reveals a little bit of humanity, but also this is where we see the core intellectual debate really play out — Black Adam doesn’t give a shit about killing people and causing mayhem, and he’s motivated by anger and revenge, whereas the JSA is trying to bring criminals to justice with as little loss of life as possible.
This is also where we can talk about how Adrianna sees the JSA — not as “heroes”, but as indifferent interlopers who were always powerful enough to help her country rid themselves of Intergang but didn’t bother to do a thing until their “protector” finally appeared. Why does the JSA fight Black Adam and not Intergang? Why do they meddle now, and not 30 years ago when their country was being overrun by crime in the first place?
There are a couple lines in the film that are absolutely worth keeping here. One is Adrianna asking those kinds of questions, and the other is Black Adam saying “Not your son. Not your country. Not your decision.”Dr. Fate continues to have confusing premonitions of great evil, but it no longer seems to fit Intergang or Black Adam. Anyway… The JSA develops a plan to use the Crown to lure Intergang out and get Amon back, but it goes wrong when Black Adam goes off script. They get Amon back, but the Crown ends up in Ishmael’s hands, which is what he always wanted, leading us to the big…
TWIST at the turn into the 3rd Act!
Ishmael reveals that he’s a long lost descendant of Anh-Kot and that he was only working with (dating?) Adrianna because he wanted to find the Crown of Sabbac and use the knowledge passed down through his family to access its magic and save Kandaq from Intergang and establish it as a global power, not to be messed with. In this way, he thinks that he is agreeing with Black Adam’s worldview, only this hits too close to home.
Ishmael is just Anh-Kot 2.0, and doesn’t care about the boy at all.
Nothing could be more enraging to Black Adam, but it’s too late. Ishmael puts on the Crown and the power he gets is not exactly as advertised. He becomes the monstrous demon Sabbac and opens the gates of hell. He has no control.
Thus…Black Adam and the JSA are now forced to work together to stop Ishmael / Sabbac in an epic 3rd Act action sequence. Maybe someone dies. Who knows.
In the end, Black Adam becomes the “lethal protector” (or something not trademarked by Marvel) of Kandaq, with JSA’s conditional acceptance, as Adrianna and Amon go about inspiring the people to build a better, freer society.
Post-credits bonus: Henry Cavill shows up as Superman, revealing that Dr. Fate asked him to get JSA’s back if Black Adam gets out of line, setting up a potential Black Adam vs. Superman fight in the future. Oooh!
At least… That’s my take.
There were a lot of good ideas in the film, but too many of them were actively contradicting each other.
By significantly simplifying the story, focusing on Black Adam as a grieving and vengeful father, eliminating the lectures about “Imperialism” that don’t make sense when applied to an illegal international criminal gang, spending more time actually establishing characters and motivations, and actually getting to know the ultimate villain by building up his ancestral connection to the main character… and, yeah… replacing the lead actor… I think this could have been an awesome movie.
Instead, it’s a C+ movie at best, full of the same kinds of flaws that have made most of the DCEU films a bit of a disappointment.