124 min | PG-13 | December 22, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Black Manta hunts Aquaman with a cursed trident and a grudge. Arthur springs his imprisoned brother to help him stop it. The team-up is the only idea here with a pulse.
Black Manta wants Aquaman dead. He recovers an ancient weapon called the Black Trident, and its buried power drives him toward the lost kingdom of Necrus. Arthur Curry rules Atlantis now and the throne does not fit him. To stop Manta he breaks his brother Orm out of prison, and the two become a reluctant team. James Wan builds the film around that pairing because the rest of the world has run dry. The movie plays less like a story than an exit.
Jason Momoa plays Arthur with the loose physical comedy that carried the first film, tossing one-liners and grinning through the chaos. The bit lands in flashes and wears thin across the whole. Patrick Wilson plays Orm as a deposed king learning to eat bugs and ride sharks, and the fish-out-of-water gag hands him the only real arc in the picture. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Black Manta with fury, but the script keeps him shouting inside a helmet for most of his scenes. Amber Heard returns as Mera and gets pushed to the margins early, while Nicole Kidman and Dolph Lundgren reprise Atlanna and King Nereus with almost nothing to play. Randall Park plays Dr. Stephen Shin as comic relief, and the plot drops him whenever it needs the room.
James Wan directs and the camera never stops moving. He swoops through trenches and lava and battle with the same restless energy he brings to the first picture. The difference is weight. Almost every frame is computer generated and the water has no resistance, so the fights float instead of land. David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick’s script stacks an environmental subplot about a heated planet on top of the revenge plot, and neither one gets room to breathe. The production design of the buried kingdom has real menace in a few shots, and the rest is a wash of teal and orange that blurs together.
A universe ends here and the film knows it. The brother dynamic between Arthur and Orm carries genuine charm and points at the lighter, smaller movie hiding inside this one. That movie never gets made. Instead the plot piles on lava monsters and ancient curses until the human-sized comedy drowns. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom closes a chapter that stopped believing in itself, and the screen reflects it back. The result moves fast and means little.