Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam has all the makings of a special disaster, the kind of which you’d expect the Critical Dunk Contest backboards (covered with Twitter and Stella Artois sponsorship branding) and racks of helium-inflated balls to be rolled out for the participants in whatever empty arena would even have an event so few people would show up to and pay for. It’s a vanity project designed solely by the world’s last-remaining true-blue action draw that has been sitting on a shelf in development hell long enough that The Rock still had hair when he first announced his intentions to bring the character to the screen. Collet-Serra’s last project, Jungle Cruise, also with the former Rocky Maivia, was genuinely pretty miserable, and you could feel him chafing against the dimensions of the project as outlined by his cage keepers at Disney. Then there’s the creative and financial turmoil that both DC Comics and Warner Bros have endured over the last two or three years in plenty of self-inflicted ways – as a reminder, this is the last tentpole film you’ll see from the studio for the rest of this calendar year – with many pointing to the lack of a stable guiding hand wrist-deep within the DC Extended Universe’s sock puppet. You can see aspects of the film some were expecting within the final product itself: There’s plenty of failed banter and half-finished CGI strewn throughout (though, admittedly, it looks one thousand times better than anything in Thor: Love and Thunder), and the occasional turn towards a Cameron-style bonding between killing machine and charge is about as clumsily executed as you might expect. But Black Adam is surprisingly compelling, both as a reactionary statement against the state of superhero cinema with geopolitical ambitions and a fun expression of all of the things it’s railing against, and if I were a betting man, I genuinely probably would have lost a decent chunk of change on this one.
Formerly known as Teth Adam, Rock’s lead was once a slave digging for rare and magical materials in the mines of the kingdom of Kahndaq some five thousand years ago. See, the king of this once-prosperous state wanted to make a crown from that miracle material in order to summon a hellish power – known as Sabbac, from beneath and cement his rule on Earth, but Adam stood up. At the moment before his execution, he was summoned away to the Rock of Eternity, where he was granted the powers of the Old Gods in the very same way that Zachary Levi was in our modern time, summoned up from the ether by the magic word “Shazam” and with its transformative power unleashed through lightning. Adam put a stop to the king’s ambitions and was subsequently sealed off in a kind of magical suspended animation, buried deep within the walls of the very prison they sealed the king’s enchanted crown within. Five thousand later, Kahndaq is a failed state, run by the mercenaries known as the Intergang, an international group of assholes dedicated to finding all of the remaining materials and, of course, the crown itself. There’s only some amount of opposition among the subjugated, who can’t compete with the high-tech devices of their invaders, coming in the form of an archeologist (Sarah Shahi), some of her family members, and her son (Bodhi Sabongui), all of whom are looking for the crown to prevent it from falling into the Intergang’s hands. When they find the crown and the tomb, they’re assaulted by the mercenaries, and in a Hail Mary play, she frees Black Adam from his suspended state.
It’s at this point that he unleashes hell itself upon the soldiers, and draws the attention of Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), who realizes that this dude is one bad motherfucker. With all the other big-leaguers not wanting to waste a contractually-bound appearance for this little of a paycheck, she turns to the Justice Society, a group of off-brand superheroes used as a public-facing Suicide Squad who are keener to playing ball with the US Government than the boys in blue tights. They’re led by Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), a winged warrior who is a kind-of alien Bruce Wayne, and the rest of their ranks – Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), who is basically a human tornado, Atom Smasher (Noah Centenio), a legacy superhero who can manipulate his size but not control insects, and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan, having a good time), a sorcerer whose magic helmet gives him his powers, allows him to see the future, and actually speak with a British accent instead of the clipped faux-American of Benedict Cumberbatch – head to Kahndaq to make the world safe for democracy from this weapon of mass destruction. Needless to say, Adam’s not too happy about this, but he also doesn’t know if he fits in this world. His state is ruined, his enemies are threatening to reemerge (Intergang still wants that crown to summon Sabbac, after all), and he doesn’t know if he really wants to keep his power, given all of the pain and trouble it has caused him across the eons. He’s a man of the Hammurabi code in a world governed by Declarations of Human Rights and things, which means he’s more brutal than he has to be, without a single thought otherwise, and scares and injures those around him. But Kahndaq needs a hero, and as the tagline goes, they have Black Adam.
At this point, it becomes clear enough that the film that has had the most impact on the direction of the DCEU’s future is James Wan’s Aquaman, which wisely positioned itself as a combination of throwback camp evocative of the days of Krull, the modern styling of blockbuster cinema, and a reasonable amount of straight-up metal imagery tossed in to boot. Shazam owed a great deal to what it had established, even if their productions were concurrent, and Black Adam continues the trend. If Marvel’s films now feel like one’s sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table with an overly-excited teen nephew trying to explain to you why the Fortnite mythos or whatever is actually cool and meaningful and worth the effort to engage with even though you are a grown-ass man with a job and cats to feed, DC seems to be aiming for the kind of doe-eyed enthusiasm that same kid had about whatever subject he was obsessed with just eight or so years earlier. There’s a large difference – that kid only cares that you’re going to take him to see the movie and doesn’t particularly care whether or not you’re going to enjoy it (though he will demand that you nod your head when he shouts about his favorite moments) – and Black Adam does a solid job of finding that niche. It is so wholly goofy and colorful – the broad colors of the Justice Society’s outfits and powers, the fact that the bad guy’s final form is essentially Tim Curry’s Satan from Legend or the massive amounts of chaos that Adam wrecks in the course of his ass-kicking – that it naturally sheds the pretentiousness of continuity. This is, after all, a movie where, within the first ten minutes, the Rock electrocutes a dude to the point that the skin and muscle sloughs off of his bones, to say nothing of the absolute ridiculousness that comprises the film’s final half hour.
What’s even more remarkable is the way Collet-Serra goes out of his way to preserve elements of the DCEU style that were once pilloried for their very presence – namely, the influence of Zack Snyder on the action photography and aspects of the thematic inner workings of Black Adam. With regards to the former, many of the film’s best action sequences preserve Snyder’s portrayal of the mythic intensity of superpowers and often evoke the best elements of his in-universe work without coming across as anything other than loving tribute. There’s a lot of fun slow-mo stuff here that is patently ridiculous, much like all of the (Academy Award-winning, however dubious that may be) Flash bits in his Justice League opus, though it substitutes the aforementioned Wan-style campiness for some of Snyder’s portentous gravitas (which, to be perfectly fair, works wonderfully in the emotional context of that particular moment in that film). The way Johnson hovers, motionless aside from the space moving around him, with his huge traps giving him a weighted hunch, creates a fascinating feeling of power even when he’s not shoving grenades in soldiers’ mouths or throwing Hawkman into buildings across the way. But the skepticism of superheroics also feels distinctly Snyderian: Adam is not all he’s cracked up to be, as revealed in a mid-film twist, and the Justice Society themselves are mere pawns in an imperialist scheme. There’s an outright element of fascist imagery here, which is endemic to much superhero media, but in Collet-Serra’s rendering, it becomes something far more interesting, as muddled as it might be.
Much of Black Adam is in direct conversation with other superhero cinema, in a way that DC and Warner Bros have often specifically gone out of their way to try and avoid, aside from one or two characters in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which similarly skewered the kind of gung-ho adventures of government-backed c-list superheroes being given the dirty work that the State would refuse to touch with obvious Hard Power. But Adam himself is a better analog for Captain America – down to imagery from the first film in that series being lifted and recontextualized by Collet-Serra at key moments – than Gunn’s Peacemaker ever was, given that he is the representation of the soul of his nation, past glory reflected through the lens of the present to offer a path forward in troubled times. On the other hand, it’s a full-throated refutation of the utopian ideals of Black Panther, where the precious resources of a fictional country led to their wholesale isolation and subsequent prosperity as opposed to their ruin by colonial powers. The inherent contradictions in large corporations trying to make this kind of agitprop are, of course, present. Still, it’s far more interesting to see ideas of self-determination and liberation – from one’s past, from one’s present – than it is to see the importance of tradition maintained, all the way down to blood combat for leadership. While Ryan Coogler’s movie is an intended fantasy of an imagined present and is successful as such, Collet-Serra has his eyes set to a kind of future, where the founding patriarchs of a failed and exploited state war and then rend the foundations that led to their subjugation.
Is it the same kind of muck and muddle that we often find ourselves in within the boundaries of the genre? Absolutely. The coherence of the thesis only really sticks together while one’s watching the film unfold, though its ultimate prescription for the ills of this fictional country is still vaguely fascinating and quite endearing. But as critique, firmly entrenched within the language of big-budget superhero cinema rather than pushed into niche-genre coding like Gunn’s, it’s undoubtedly provocative in a very real way, emphasizing the consequences of imperialism, both state and corporate, and a kind of need for individual stability and safety – which can only come from within – before a nation can fully join the ranks of international society as a full and equal peer (though, of course, without the guiding hand to enable that stability, as literalized through the metaphor of Adam, that same international society will do whatever it possibly can to prevent that from happening in resource-rich nations). Given that the superhero boom truly kicked off with two War on Terror-era works that established a kind of relevancy for a genre otherwise stylistically estranged from all geopolitical realism, it’s a hell of a thing that we’ve some fourteen years down the line and finally have a full-throated rebuke of the sort of post-9/11 Middle Eastern adventure that the escapist trappings of Iron Man helped to found the MCU on. For all of Black Adam’s messiness, the fact that it can sell this to a primarily American audience and do so in an entertaining-enough fashion is extraordinary to witness.