125 min | PG-13 | October 21, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A god wakes after five thousand years of imprisonment and finds his nation still occupied. He has the power of six deities and zero interest in being a hero. The premise asks what justice looks like with no mercy. The movie answers with slow-motion and a Rock who forgot to bring the charisma.
Teth-Adam wakes after five thousand years of imprisonment with the power of the gods and no interest in using it heroically. The film hands Dwayne Johnson an antihero who kills without hesitation and frames his violence as overdue justice for a colonized nation. A team of established heroes arrives to contain him while a local resistance movement treats him as a liberator. The setup gestures at a real question about whether the powerful should answer to anyone. The movie keeps raising the question and then drowning it in another action sequence.
Dwayne Johnson plays Black Adam with a stillness that reads as boredom more than menace. He delivers his lines flat and lets the visual effects do the acting, and the character never develops an interior beyond grim resolve. Pierce Brosnan plays Doctor Fate with a weary intelligence that the rest of the cast lacks. Brosnan treats Kent Nelson as a man who has seen too many futures, and his scenes carry a gravity the spectacle around them cannot match. Aldis Hodge plays Hawkman as pure rigid duty, and Noah Centineo and Quintessa Swindell get reduced to power demonstrations and reaction shots.
Jaume Collet-Serra directs from a script by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani, and the partnership that produced the lean tension of their previous collaborations vanishes here. The action leans on relentless slow-motion, and Collet-Serra ramps the speed down so often that the technique stops registering as emphasis and starts registering as filler. The fictional city of Kahndaq exists almost entirely as digital backdrop, and the production design never gives the place texture or weight. The score buries every scene under wall-to-wall percussion and needle-drop rock cues. Nothing on screen is allowed to breathe.
Black Adam wants to be the film that breaks the superhero formula and instead delivers the formula at maximum volume. The interesting movie buried inside it is about a weapon that a people built to free themselves and now cannot control. That movie surfaces in flashes and then disappears under another setpiece. Collet-Serra has the cast and the premise to interrogate power and chooses to celebrate it instead.