BLACK ADAM

Y'know, a more fitting title for this would be Black Adam & The JSA. Or maybe Black Adam and the Liberation of Kahndaq. Perhaps The JSA, featuring Black Adam. Or maybe Freedom: Kahndaq. Or maybe...

Let's just get to the review already. During 2600 BC in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kahndaq, a young slave boy leads a revolt against the tyrranical king. In this effort, he is given the powers of Shazam (hey, nice to see Djimon Hounsou back) and successfully liberates his people...or so we see. Fast forward to the present day, and now the country is being colonized by a crime syndicate known as the Intergang. A group of archaeologists successfully reawaken the liberator known as Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson), a superpowered individual with all the powers of Superman but none of the squeaky clean morality. It is up to the Justice Society of America to stop him while struggling to...um...destroy the...uh...all-powerful crown of Something or Other. 

OK, all joking aside, this is a really difficult film to summarize because there's just SO MUCH STUFF GOING ON. It almost plays out like a very rushed first draft that didn't have time to go through any editorial process. And the pacing is just out of whack. So much of this film just follows the process of "Exposition, Action Scene, Repeat" with little time set aside for any meaningful character development. And what's worse,  just when the film should logically end, it pulls an extra underwhelming climax out of its ass that not only draws everything out, but makes the previous climax feel utterly pointless. Johnson and all the rest of the cast are trying their hardest, but the script - penned by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani - doesn't do them any favor as it rocks them back and forth between multiple plotlines, different tones (there are so many weird needle drops during action scenes, like the film wanted to be Guardians of the Galaxy or Kick-Ass or something), and multiple different themes. 

But the saddest part about all this? Every one of those themes would have worked great if explored a little more. See, there's a scene where the Justice Society of America (JSA) - comprised of Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan, still has it after all these years) comes into Kahndaq to battle Black Adam. Afterwards, a character named Adrianna Tomaz - the archaeologist who awakened him (Sarah Shahi) - gives them a stern talking-to about how the JSA never bothered to come to Kahndaq when they were colonized, but now decide to intervene when Black Adam is helping to defend them against the colonizing forces of Intergang. Actually, the whole film has this liberatory theme on its mind, and it's a very prescient stance to take, given the situation in Palestine and Iran. And ultimately, without giving too much away, the film comes to a pretty revolutionary conclusion on that front...at least, as revolutionary as a film from a multibillion-dollar conglomerate can be. But again, it doesn't get its time to shine because it's just one out of three or four things going on!

Aside from that, how's everything else? Not that bad, actually. Jaume Collet-Serra can direct the hell out of an action scene, even if you don't care about the stakes; Lorne Balfe's score is pretty epic when it needs to be, and yeah, it's hard not to get excited about future prospects based on what goes down in a post-credits scene. Plus, there are some really funny bits of gallows humor involving Black Adam's propensity for killing his enemies. But once again, all those elements get buried under an unfocussed script that juggles too many tones, themes, and plot elements for any of it to really stick. 

So, all in all, not terrible, but definitely not good. I'd say skip it.