Black Adam Review: Dwayne Johnson-starrer hits the rocks
Hyderabad: Director Jaume Collet-Serra is no stranger to action movies. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is no stranger to action either. When both get together, you expect Diwali to come a few days early. Tragically it does not. It is more like the rain playing spoilsport on the day of Diwali. DC and Warner Bros have got their strategy wrong. So wrong. Though an origin story, neither does it have the punch that Nolan’s Batman Begins had nor the charisma of Snyder’s Man of Steel.
To the uninitiated, the movie is based on a DC Comics character. The film opens with a complicated prologue (one that is entirely necessary for all except the most invested fans of the DC Comics franchise from which Black Adam has sprung). Kahndaq is a fictional country somewhere in the Middle East. Here you have Teth-Adam aka Black Adam (Dwayne) with powers beyond those of any mortal. He has been blessed with superpowers – strength, speed, flight, the ability to channel lightning-like electricity and withstand projectiles (to name a few) by a group of wizards harnessing the energy of a local mineral called Eternium. He can turn his powers on and off by uttering the word Shazam. He is the champion to defeat the evil king of Kahndaq, Anh-Kot. And then, he goes into a slumber.
Fast forward 5,000 years (Black Adam beats Rip wan Winkle and Kumbakarna). The Intergang, a ruthless posse of violent imperialist mercenaries now rules over Kahndaq. An underground group of Kahndaqi partisans, led by a former academic named Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), is seeking a long-buried relic, but so is the Intergang. In the squabbling process, they awaken Adam. What follows is a gruesome bloodbath of the Intergang goons. Characters are thrown at you. Black Adam is ‘coached’ on being a superhero. Tragically, he is the shoots lightning bolts out of his fingers first, asks questions later kind of a guy. The remainder of the film is about whether he becomes a team player or whether he is the lone ranger types.
The action sequences are predictable. The fight scenes are tiresome. With too many new and probably unfamiliar superheroes crammed into one film, you might wonder how the director manage to introduce them with meaningful storytelling. He doesn’t even try to do so. He has only heard half of Judson L Moore’s quote “A bad plan is better than no plan, and the most important quality of any plan is the flexibility to change” and once you see the starting 30 minutes of the film, you know which half I’m talking about. There are too many characters in the film for Dwayne to carry it on his shoulders. He is quirky when and where required. There is a scene where Adrianna’s comics-obsessed teenage son Amon Tomaz (Bodhi Sabongui) teaches Black Adam a catch phrase and you can see Dwayne being himself.
The question is not whether the world needs Black Adam, but rather does a world need another superhero protecting it. The rate at which superheroes are cropping up, one may soon need a film where the hero is just a common man.
This Black Adam is too black!!
