davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
The question that “Black Adam” poses is a simple one: What happens when Hollywood’s most risk-averse movie star collides with Hollywood’s most risk-averse movie genre? The answer provided by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s depressingly inevitable (and inevitably depressing) foray into the superhero-industrial complex is, of course, even simpler: Exactly what you’d expect. Only worse.
All due respect to whatever unique and illustrious history Black Adam may have developed since his DC Comics debut in 1945, but the lifeless spectacle that director Jaume Collet-Serra — who made some nifty thrillers before “Jungle Cruise” reduced him to the John Ford of Rawson Marshall Thurbers — has cobbled together for the character’s big screen origin story is so exhaustingly derivative of other superhero movies that the ancient Egyptian antihero might as well not have any history at all.
The problems stem from an irreconcilable mismatch between star and subject. Part of the issue is that playing the Scorpion King does not, in fact, make someone of Middle Eastern descent (even if they did it twice). The other major cause of the disconnect is that Johnson’s fatal allergy to bold creative choices makes his brand a hopeless fit for such a politically fraught blockbuster — the tale of a superpowered former slave who wakes up from a 5,000-year nap and chooses to resist the American “liberators” in his fictional, Iraq-coded country with extreme force. Later, they team up to fight what might be the single most forgettable villain in comic book movie history, which is a wild thing to say about a giant hell demon with a pentagram scar across its entire chest, or about a genre that once pitted the Hulk against… a slightly neckier version of the Hulk.
“Black Adam” so desperately wants to be a darker and gristlier version of the same hamburger that audiences have been served over and over again for the last 15 years, but Johnson — who’s also a producer on the film, and a part-time architect of this cinematic universe in addition to our own — can’t abide the idea of doing something that might leave even one audience member behind. He doesn’t have the stomach to make Black Adam much of an antihero, let alone a bad guy (the character is workshopping catchphrases within a few scenes of waking up, and has a habit of disappearing from sight whenever things get complicated).
And so Johnson has made a decidedly PG-13 movie that lacks the imagination to take anyone with it. There isn’t a single character here that doesn’t feel like a cheap photocopy of one from Gotham or the MCU, not a single beat that doesn’t feel like it hasn’t been audience-tested within an inch of its life, not a single fight scene that isn’t smothered to death by the DCEU’s signature CGI gloop. “The superhero-industrial complex is worth a lot of money,” a character whose name I’ve already forgotten observes at one point, and “Black Adam” becomes a part of that business with all the fun and enthusiasm of a hedge fund buying $200 million worth of blue chip stocks.