Black Adam

Black Adam first appeared in Fawcett Comics in 1945, in what was then known as the Marvel Family, as an antagonist to Billy Batson's Captain Marvel, now known as Shazam after it became clear that it was confusing for one of DC Comics' stable of heroes to share their name with a rival publisher. If you want to go really into the weeds you can look at how Marvel Man and Marvel's Captain Marvel and Marvel Boy (not be confused with Superboy who appeared a year or so after Black Adam) and, heck, throw in the whole Marvelman/Miracleman thing and you'll spend a while looking at how various superheroes and their adventures are differentiated. If you took long enough that you thought about getting a cup of tea and maybe a biscuit that'd be more effort than appears to have been expended making Black Adam distinct.

I blame Frank Miller. I mean, not specifically for this, it's not as bad as The Spirit. There are times when what's on screen appears to be directly lifted from his art style, though more often it's as interpreted by Zach Snyder in 300. Marvelman/Miracleman was a title that Alan Moore was once reputed to be willing to give his eye-teeth to work on, but whatever the wizard of Northampton would give to be disassociated from this sort of pablum is between him and the snake in his attic. Snyder's version of Watchmen is referenced here too, but it will be tedious to list all the comic book movies that Black Adam borrows from when there are so many other movies from which it cribs. Back To The Future for a start, in a scene soundtracked by the Smashing Pumpkins Bullet With Buttefly Wings which is almost as far from today as the 1950s were from Huey Lewis & The News. There's an apartment lobby that looks to be a tribute to the Bradbury Building as it appeared in Blade Runner, though the flying machines in it owe more to 1995's Judge Dredd than Syd Mead's spinners. There are a couple of scenes seen on a television that are taken from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, there's a catchphrase that relies on the colour of Teth-Adam's costume, and there's no country music.

I know that Snyder used The Man Comes Around'in his remake of Dawn Of The Dead but given how much is borrowed in a cynical exercise in brand extension and franchise leverage you'd think there could be some Cash to spare. We've got boilerplate brass and strings from the opening credits, and that makes the appearance of a John Williams piece from what that would constitute a spoiler all the more of a disservice to Lorne Balfe, who did the Lego Batman Movies, some of the Missions: Impossible, and also a couple of episodes of River City. Boilerplate is from a different Clint Eastwood movie, but its use here feels not that it's borrowing from Leone but Logan.

Lawrence Sher lenses, He did the Hangover trilogy, Joker, a bunch of other comedies, and whatever effort he's made is subsumed here in the work of somewhere of the order of ten special effects houses. The geography of Khandaq is not only rich with exposition but much like Wakanda it is (blessed/cursed with miracle-mineral 'Eternium'. To keep your chronology straight, Black Adam predates Black Panther by 21 years, but Vibranium predates Eternium by 32.

Elsewhere in the superheroic act of painting by numbers there's plenty of teal and orange. Amazingly not most prominent in a Volkswagen van whose livery appears similar to a racing sponsor. Gulf-colours persist elsewhere, most scenes appear graded extensively with either the 'Middle-East' or 'Mexico' filters. Khandaq appears to be somewhere in central territorial coastal Nepal, as between its beats and beatings it seems to have steep mountain strip mines and rural pagoda rice paddies with sound stage slums in between. In that city a statue's severed fist sits on a plinth on a roundabout, the graffiti appears to read 'Liberté Egalité Prosperité' and I don't know if that avoidance of brotherhood is meant to be inclusive, exclusive, or to avoid offending Magneto and his 'evil mutants'. The baddie conglomerate who subjugate Khandaq are called Intergang, but though they seem to be named in German they seem mostly Australian, dressed like the protagonists of a video game series with a key for war crimes and gambling-regulated downloadable content for skull masks or special ammunition.

Writers Adam Sztykiel (Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Road Chip, Rampage), Rory Haines and Sohram Noshirvani (The Mauritanian) appear to have struggled with the demands of the DC Expanded Universe. The scene during the credits features a machine that comes from the heavens to deliver what amount to two cameos from entities with god-like power. The opening scenes feature a quantity of exposition and events that recall the worst opening crawls of the Star Wars saga and also Uncut Gems. The Safdies had more fun with that though, their film with Adam Sandler might feel like an ongoing panic attack but it's still more compelling than Black Adam.

Jaume Collet-Serra directed Dwayne Johnson in Jungle Cruise, but this owes more to the tone of his several collaborations with Liam Neeson. If he hadn't been cup-tied as Christopher Nolan's Ras-Al-Ghul he might have been more fun (and more weary) as Doctor Fate than Pierce Brosnan. Noah Centino's Atom Smasher (channelling (Gi)Ant-Man) and Quintessa Swindell's Cyclone (controlling slightly fewer elements of meteorology than X-Men's Storm) round out a detached squad of The Justice Society. The 'of America' goes unspoken, except perhaps in the politics where there's only foreign intervention when their own interests are threatened. We see Suicide Squad's Waller (and more than once) and it's again in service of what's called 'global stability'. Except that's in a 'hard men making hard decisions' sense and even when there's an explicit reference to the 'superhero industrial complex' Aldis Hodge's Hawkman is part of an ensemble that never quite assembles.

Hodge was part of a criminal crime-fighting group in TV series Leverage but here he's stuck as antagonist to an antihero with a costume borrowed from Alex Ross and a logo borrowed from The Thundercats and a toyetic detachable submersible that owes a debt to Lando Calrissian and Nite-Owl. That one big scene sees him using both a circular shield and his retractable wings doesn't feel like a triumphant moment as much as an attempt to get their borrowing from Captain America: New World Order in early.

If you've seen much of the MCU then lots of this will feel familiar. There's moments that are borrowed from other places, we might have 20 years and change from The Matrix: Revolutions' 'Burly Brawl' but we learn less about the two (plus) involved in the fight(s) that use it than we did about Neo and Smith. When someone says "What I said is called sarcasm" it feels more lifted than any bit of gym equipment in the henching up of those on screen. Actual lifting includes an embiggening fastball special, a moment that recalls Conan (or Riddick), some Shaun Of The Dead, some Minority Report, maybe even some Demolition Man. There are stacks of different kinds of slow-motion, some bullet-time, some Quicksilver soundtrack-shenanigans, some Snyder-style pause-panel punching, and in and among all those hyphens what one might charitably call homages to other heroes.

I will believe a man can fly. I might ask myself how he came to learn the word 'bike' though, or consider that he might get both the bends and hypothermia. I might question chronology that ignores Ur or misplaces a few pyramids. I will wonder at what appears to be a bucket wheel excavator that's mounted on a circular track rather than tracks. I will lament a story that's ostensibly about morality that isn't black and white but is instead just dark and muddily hued.

Did it meet my expectations? They weren't high, but no, not really. A bedroom battle feels like an exercise in creating through collateral damage opportunities to reference other DC heroes. It's as subtle an act of product placement as the presence of a FedEx dispatch office and a branch of clothing brand GUESS. It's not just in martial multiplicity that members of the cast appear more than once, and dual roles do add a certain something to proceedings, but it's less gilt on a lily than polish on the proverbial.

At one point someone says they're "three miles out, give me 20 seconds", and that sounds fast but when you do the maths that's just 180mph. Never mind a speeding bullet, there are locomotives more powerful. There are also plenty of other films to choose from. I said earlier that I blame Frank Miller, and that's because he was part of a generation of creators whose prominence cemented the notion that comic books weren't for kids any more. There was often a 'just' in the headlines, but changes in markets and audiences put paid to that.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a plastic sleeve or perspex box darkly. I replaced them with collectables, with things that were 'mature' not because they were emotionally complex but because they had blood and whores. Things that children cannot touch because they might affect their value, which is fiscal and not moral. Perhaps nowhere is this more absolute than with DC Comics' films, where Batgirl has been destroyed in the interests of tax efficiency. I won't fault you for going to see Black Adam, but you can do better. I'm pretty confident that everyone involved in its production could too.