Black Adam (2022) Review
3/10
A slave in an ancient kingdom is granted the powers of gods, entombed for five thousand years, and released into a modern occupied nation by an archaeologist looking for a crown.
The 3 is for a film that’s competently assembled and has no personality at all. The photography is grey, the locations are rubble, the action is rendered, and the central figure is a man who doesn’t change and can’t be hurt.
Black Adam bored me, and I didn’t expect that from a film this loud. It’s two hours of a man who can’t be hurt punching things that can’t hurt him, in a palette the color of wet cardboard. I kept waiting for something to be at stake, and nothing ever was.
What’s interesting is the context. This was positioned as a reset for a struggling continuity, arrived on an enormous marketing claim, and was followed within a year by the decision to abandon the continuity entirely.
An Invulnerable Lead Is a Structural Problem
Teth-Adam can’t be injured, can’t be stopped, doesn’t tire, and has no moral uncertainty he’s willing to discuss. That removes every source of tension a film has. The action sequences are people attacking him unsuccessfully, and the film’s only available escalation is to introduce something that can also not be hurt. The script’s answer is to make the conflict about whether he should kill. That’s a question he settles in the first fifteen minutes and never revisits. He kills people, the film shows it, nobody stops him, and characters who lose the argument raise the ethical objection.
The film also wants the killing to be satisfying and to be a problem at the same time. Each death is staged as a payoff, scored as a triumph, and then criticized in the next scene by somebody the film treats as prissy.
The worst part is that the film wants applause for every kill and then wants me to feel scolded for clapping, and it never commits to either. Compare Superman, who’s also invulnerable and works because the stories are about what he chooses. The vulnerability in those stories is other people, and this film gives its lead nobody he’s meaningfully attached to.
An invulnerable protagonist needs a vulnerability that’s not physical, and it has to be somebody instead of something. The standard solution is a person the character can lose. This film gives Adam a dead son in flashback. That’s a loss that’s already happened and therefore can’t be threatened.
A moral question the character answers early isn’t a moral question. If he decides in act one and never wavers, you’ve written a position instead of a conflict.
Test your antagonist by asking what happens if the protagonist simply does nothing. If the answer is that he wins anyway, there’s no scene.
The Justice Society Is the Film
Four characters arrive to contain him, and all four are more interesting than the person the film is about. Pierce Brosnan’s Doctor Fate is the best thing in it by a distance. A man wearing a helmet that shows him the future, who knows how he’s going to die, and who’s playing a version of himself that’s tired of the arrangement. Brosnan gives it melancholy in a film with none.
Brosnan is the only reason I’d sit through any of it again. Every time the helmet comes off he looks like a man who’s read the script and made his peace with it, and I’d have happily watched a whole film about Fate.
Aldis Hodge’s Hawkman is the other one that works. He’s an institutional figure, has a house full of equipment, employs people, and treats the situation as a security problem instead of a personal one. The friendship between him and Fate is the only relationship in the picture with any history behind it.
The two younger members are thin and the film knows it, giving them an arc about confidence that goes nowhere. Cyclone and Atom Smasher exist so the team has four members. The Society also raises a question the film never resolves. They’re an established organization with resources, a base and a history, and none of that’s been visible in any previous entry. That means the film is introducing institutional weight it hasn’t earned.
Kahndaq Is Not Examined
The setting is a fictional Middle Eastern nation occupied by a foreign mercenary force, whose people are oppressed, and whose liberation the film is ostensibly about.
That’s a real premise and the film does nothing with it beyond set dressing. The occupiers are anonymous soldiers in black, the resistance is a family, and the political situation exists to give Adam something to destroy.
It also raises an awkward question and then declines to engage. A foreign force arrives to stop a local figure from using violence against an occupation, and the film’s international heroes are on the side of restraint without anybody addressing what that looks like.
Adam gets one good line about it, asking who was protecting Kahndaq before any of them arrived, and the film doesn’t answer. A sharper picture would have made that the argument and this one uses it as a retort in a fight. I think this is the film’s biggest missed chance. That line about who protected Kahndaq is the only moment it touches a real idea, and it throws it away as a comeback in a fight.
Sarah Shahi’s Adrianna carries what little the film has about the occupation. She’s an archaeologist, a mother, and part of a resistance, and the picture gives her a son to protect and a speech about liberation, and no scene where she decides anything.
If you build a political situation into your setting, either engage with it or remove it. Using an occupation as a backdrop for spectacle is a choice readers notice. The half-measure is the worst option, since it raises a question that then hangs over everything the protagonists do. Let the antagonist ask the question the protagonists can’t answer, and then give them the burden of answering it. This film asks and moves on. Set dressing that gestures at real suffering will always be read as a claim. Decide what you’re claiming before you put it in the frame.
The Look
Almost the entire film takes place in rubble, sand and grey interiors, lit flat, with a color grade that removes saturation from everything.
That’s a stylistic choice made repeatedly across a decade of these films and it’s worth naming because it costs nothing to avoid. The visual monotony makes two hours feel considerably longer and gives the eye nothing to hold. The costume design is the same problem. Adam wears black with a small gold emblem, the soldiers wear black, the occupied city is brown, and the one character with a distinctive silhouette is the man in the gold helmet.
Compare it to what the 1960 Magnificent Seven or Rio Bravo do with clothing and light. You can identify those films from a single frame, and you can’t distinguish this one from four other releases of the same year.
The excuse offered for this palette is realism, and it’s not an excuse. A film about a man who shoots lightning from his hands in an ancient kingdom has no realism obligation, and the grey is a default instead of a decision.
The grey drove me up the wall. A man throwing lightning around an ancient kingdom should look like a comic book panel, and this looks like a parking garage at dusk.
The Hierarchy of Power
Johnson campaigned publicly for years on the claim that this film would change the hierarchy of power in the DC universe, and the marketing repeated it continuously. Against a budget reported at around two hundred, the film took around three hundred and ninety million, which with marketing meant it didn’t make money. Eleven months later the studio’s new leadership announced that the continuity was being rebuilt from scratch and that this character wouldn’t be continuing. That sequence is the most instructive thing about the whole enterprise. An enormous personal campaign, a positioning claim that promised a structural change, and a corporate decision that rendered all of it irrelevant within a year. None of that is unusual in itself. What was unusual is how much of the claim was made publicly and personally, by the star, over a period long enough that a great many people were holding him to it when the decision came.
The cameo the film was built toward, arriving in a post-credits scene after years of speculation, was also voided by the same decision. It’s the single clearest example of a film whose entire value proposition was a promise about the future.
Johnson himself isn’t the problem. That’s worth saying. He’s a capable screen presence and the role gives him nothing to play, since the character doesn’t doubt, doesn’t learn and can’t be threatened.
Never build your work on a promise about what comes next. If the value is in the sequel, the current book has to survive the sequel never arriving. That happens more often than anybody plans for, in publishing as much as in film.
A campaign isn’t a story. Enthusiasm from the person making the thing isn’t transferable to an audience, and claims about significance are the least persuasive form of marketing available. The test is whether the work stands with the future removed. Strip the post-credits scene and the positioning, and ask whether anybody would recommend what remains.
Should you watch Black Adam?
No, unless you’re there for Pierce Brosnan. This gets a 3 because it’s competently made and completely empty: a hero who can’t be hurt, a city that’s all rubble, a grey that drains every frame, and a whole marketing campaign about a future that got canceled eleven months after release. Brosnan’s melancholy performance inside that gold helmet is the only thing keeping it off the bottom of the scale, and he deserved a better film around him.
