While the tagline for Black Adam — “power born from rage” — is fitting when you get to know the context of its teeny-tiny story, chances are that your anger will also, justifiably, be born from rage, once you leave the cinema.

After the rage eventually dies down, you might be thinking of a vastly better tagline for the movie: how to make everything stupid.

The everything includes the characters — a roster of second-tier heroes: Hawkman, Doctor Fate, Cyclone and Atom Smasher called the Justice Society of America (JSA) — any visceral trace of depth, likeability, intelligence, quality of cinematography, editing, visual effects, direction, yada yada.

Black Adam is a tank of a movie. It tanks (crashes) as a film, and with its slightly over-two-hours running time, tanks over (crunches) your senses with its mind-fogging dumbness and loud, lifeless, repetitive action sequences.

Even Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson cannot save the listless superhero flick that is Black Adam

Even Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who plays the titular hero, and who can often save bad movies with his excellent comedic timing and guaranteed box-office earnings, cannot save this listless superhero flick.

But then, as he keeps saying throughout the movie, he doesn’t feel the need to, because he is no hero.

But he is, even when he flat out says “No”. The correct word Black Adam should be using is ‘anti-hero’ — meaning he is no hero, and he will not be part of a superhero group, and he will fight them without knowing anything about their missions, but he can be a hero when the occasion calls for it.

Well, the occasion calls for it every other minute.

Designed to be nothing more than a sequence of big events that realigns the trajectory of DC superhero films, Black Adam introduces a divergent origin story to the comics.

Some 5,000 years ago, in the city of Kahndaq, a fictional country somewhere in the Middle East and Africa, a despot king made a crown from a rare mineral found only in his kingdom, that can open a gate to the demon realm, where he can strike a bargain to be a god.

During a brief revolution, a young boy is given the powers of the gods by the wizard Shazam (the same guy who gave Billy Batson the same power in the movie Shazam!), and becomes the saviour of Kahndaq, but who mysteriously disappears after taking out the king.

The present-day city of Kahndaq is a mixture of Hollywood’s idea of Iraq in the 1990s — a bustling, dusty, metropolis of middle class architecture and people, that is, approximately, only a few blocks deep (the action keeps happening in the same city streets).

With no democratically voted government handling the city’s affairs, and the superheroes avoiding the city’s issues, Kahndaq is taken over by Intergang — a mercenary group that patrol the city on hovercrafts…when they’re not bullying locals at traffic signals and markets.

Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi), an Indiana Jones-styled archaeologist single mother, her skateboard-riding son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) who is enamoured by superheroes, and her pudgy, mangled-haired brother Karim (Mohammed Amer, obviously the comic relief), help Black Adam realise that he is their champion, after he is resurrected by a simple cave excavation.

I kid you not: Adrianna just walks in, and lo and behold, Black Adam and the crown were there to be set free; talk about an utter lack of adventure and lazy writing!

Talking about lazy writing: the screenplay by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani indulges in bad exposition, one lone punchline that doesn’t work, repeated skirmishes between the JSA and Black Adam, and any placeholders for story connectivity to the larger DC film universe.

As people will already know — since there is no escaping this revelation in today’s digital age — Henry Cavill’s Superman makes an official cameo at the end of the movie, signalling the actor’s return to the iconic role (Man of Steel 2 and 3, are reportedly speeding through development). But even this moment is hardly above a slightly enthusiastic response between an ‘ahhh’ and a ‘meh’.

Jaume Collet-Serra, a dependable director of slightly above-average horror and action films (House of Wax, Orphan, Non-Stop, Run All Night, The Shallows, Jungle Cruise), should be happy with his paycheque, because any respectable man would be unhappy with how Black Adam turns out.

Even with The Rock’s magnetic charisma holding the screen — irrespective of his rock-like performance — and an okay turn by Aldis Hodge and a likeable Pierce Brosnan, playing the nearly indestructible Hawkman and the Doctor Strange-like hero Doctor Fate (the latter is a powerhouse and had much to offer), there is little here that counts as original, engaging or worth remembering.

Like much of the “content” on streaming sites, Black Adam is a big-budget space filler for bigger, perhaps crappy, superhero films to come.

Also starring Quintessa Swindell and Noah Centineo as JSA members Cyclone and Atom Smasher, Black Adam is playing in cinemas worldwide. The movie is rated PG-13 for scenes of bland, senseless destruction

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 30th, 2022