on BLACK ADAM

Black Adam is a movie I liked less the longer it went on. It starts fine, though a bit slow, and plods along with its very bland plotting, wafer-thin characters, and try-hard dialogue. Occasionally, it sparks to life and flashes some color and fun when the JSA show up, then comes to nearly a complete stop just before the third act. I checked my watch more than twice around the time Black Adam inexplicably surrendered and allowed himself to be de-powered and imprisoned.

Everything about the pacing and editing screamed "this is the denouement at the end of the movie" even though there had been no real climactic battle. Then, just as soon as he's locked away, they've got to break him out. I get the script had a need to remove him from the story for a bit, but the execution of that need was woefully lacking. The movie basically came to a halt and then had to rev back up for the finale against a final boss that was nothing more than a remix of the Whedon version of the Justice League fighting Steppenwolf.

While I won't go so far as to say Black Adam himself is the worst part of his movie, he is probably the second or third-worst part. He's far from the best. In fact, it's Pierce Brosnan's Dr. Fate that steals the show here...so of course they kill him off. Brosnan has a gravitas that works perfectly as Dr. Fate, and the actor seems perfectly at home in the cartoony world of comic book movies. I suppose playing Bond in more than a couple very cartoony 007 films helps in that regard. Alongside him is a very game Aldis Hodge as Hawkman. He's not given a lot to work with in the screenplay (neither is Dr. Fate, I suppose) but he carries himself well as the de facto leader of the Justice Society. The two younger heroes---Noah Centineo as Atom Smasher and Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone---have even less character development, but there's potential there with all four of them.

Oh wait, all three of them; they killed off the best of the bunch in his first outing.

None of the JSA are given even a fraction of the backstory as Black Adam, making the movie almost feel like a sequel film when we never got to see the origin story of how the team came to be. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about this: The movie is called Black Adam and not Justice Society, after all. But the fact remains, this would have been a much better Justice Society film than it was a Black Adam one. I'd much rather prefer the film had been reworked to focus on the team, with Black Adam  functioning as a chaotic neutral, and the demon king monster thing as the big bad (ideally to be featured for more than the final fifteen minutes). In that case, end the movie with the villain defeated and Black Adam leaving/going rogue, setting him up as a big bad for a future movie. But I suppose the film itself was too much of a Dwayne Johnson project for that to happen. He won't allow himself to play an outright villain, which makes the inevitable Superman showdown a preemptive disappointment.

7/10