Film Review: BLACK ADAM (2022): Dwayne Johnson’s Science Fiction Movie Looks Great But is Messy and Often Incoherent

Black Adam Review

Black Adam (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, written by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani and starring Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, Pierce Brosnan, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Quintessa Swindell, Marwan Kenzari, Bodhi Sabongui, Mohammed Amer, James Cusati-Moyer, Jalon Christian, Benjamin Patterson, Odelya Halevi, Henry Winkler, Jennifer Holland, Uli Latukefu and Chaim Jeraffi.

Black Adam, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, brings Dwayne Johnson into the DCEU and, for the most part, the actor is forced to deliver wooden dialogue as the science fiction movie keeps unveiling ludicrous plot developments in a haphazard fashion. Collet-Serra and Johnson have worked together before on Jungle Cruise which suffered from some of the same problems Black Adam does. That’s not to say the huge budget of Black Adam is not evident on the screen. It most certainly is. It’s just that the scenes on-screen feel poorly scripted and messy. There’s too many main characters and too much mindless action. You’ll need a scorecard to keep track of all the different characters who appear in the movie.

Black Adam almost feels like a disaster in the vein of Battlefield Earth but it has already received some nice audience feedback which means my response to the film is certainly not the majority opinion. Batgirl was recently given the cold shoulder by this film’s studio, Warner Bros., but it’s doubtful that Batgirl could be as messy from a scripting standpoint as Black Adam is.

Set in a fictional country known as Khandaq, the movie opens with a flashback sequence which introduces the audience to the film’s setting and sets the stage for the events that will transpire for the remainder of the picture. Teth-Adam (Johnson) is eventually the movie’s main character. He’s a slave in a tomb who gets brought back to life by an educator/researcher named Adrianna Tomaz (an adequate Sarah Shahi). The Justice Society of America gets involved in the action and is led by Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan). These two characters serve as major supporting characters but don’t have much going for them in terms of charisma.

There’s even a bad guy who looks like the character Hellboy from the film of the same name to help the action get really intensive. This is evident of the movie’s major weakness because the film looks like it has jumbled similar concepts and images from films like The Mummy and Hellboy to tell its lackluster tale.

Dwayne Johnson and Pierce Brosnan have their moments together. A couple of scenes where they jokingly exchange witty banter and compare notes on sarcasm are cute but the majority of their dialogues together sound stilted and unrealistic. Hawkman becomes a key character in the action but Hodge is forced to recite lines that are so inane, one wonders how this script managed to get made without major dialogue rewrites. Hawkman looks heroic enough but the screenplay doesn’t do him justice.

Noah Centineo and Quintessa Swindell co-star as two of the more successful characters in the film: Atom Smasher and Cyclone. These roles only work, though, because of the very distinct personalities of the aforementioned performers. However, there are still problems with the dialogue present that these stars successfully overcome in certain spots which is why I am singling out their energetic performances.

As Teth-Adam, Johnson tries his hardest to be heroic enough but the movie’s presentation of him is a mixed-bag. By making him so serious, there is a definite lack of humor in Johnson’s work. This may be appropriate for the role but it isn’t fun for the audience to endure. If Johnson’s work in Jungle Cruise displayed the lighter side of his personality, Black Adam displays the much darker (and more dull) side.

As the film gets closer to its conclusion, there is a fun scene or two where our heroes fend off some skeleton warriors and the ending scenes, in general, tend to be more enjoyable than the opening ones. Some characters will live and some will die and the movie pretends one of them is going to die but then reveals a plot twist that is clever enough.

Black Adam is long and dark, though. There are action sequences that stand out significantly as impressive from a technical standpoint. However, the majority of the movie is just too wild and all over the place for the film’s own good. There is some technically superb editing that tries to bring the plot threads together for the audience but the story line is still hard to follow for much of the film and Johnson needed more of his signature personality to make this role really work in his favor.

If you choose to see this movie, stay tuned at the end credits for a mid-credits scene that is probably the best part of Black Adam which is ultimately a movie that tries way too hard. It needed more humanity, a stronger plot and less action-filled chaos to work fluidly as a film.

Rating: 5.5/10

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