At this point, you know what you get with the Rock and his acting. Somehow he seems to have less of the charisma here. He wants to be a guy that is so bad ass, he doesn't talk much, but he punches stuff a lot. And flies everywhere. And lift things. You know what, I see why the Rock wanted this movie. He wanted to look cool.
Indulge me for a few minutes while I make a wrestling analogy to describe what I was thinking as I watched this movie. It's very apropos here. Black Adam is this new "hero" on the scene and he wants to get over with the crowd. So he is shown handling people with ease and is built up as this big hero. He destroys stuff and he has a "I'm cooler than you demeanor." The crowd turns on him because he is being shoved down our throats and is not what we want. So then they try to give him tougher competition where we are supposed to cheer for him. We don't. Then they do a face turn later and we accept it with mild applause. Did I miss the mark?
This movie can't decide if Black Adam is untouchable or if guys like freaking Hawkman can go toe to toe with him. They never fully define his powers because then they would have to follow rules and who wants to do that?
Before I start tearing this movie down, let me go with what I actually liked. To it's credit, this movie just looks different. That's because it takes place in North Africa. I could look up the specifics, but why bother. It's in a made up location, so just go with me here. I can see that an effort was made to get a cast made up of people from the region, in the way that Marvel's Moon Knight was. With the Rock's ethnically ambiguous look, he can slide in here without it being a huge problem. So we don't see those sprawling American cities like we normally see in these movies. We are in a different country and we stay here for the whole movie. The setting of this movie makes it refreshing.
For whatever reason, I really liked the choice of Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate. He brought a class and elegance to this movie that I didn't think he could. Maybe it's the accent, but it felt like he was acting rings around everyone else. He also just had a cool look.
That's the nicest things I can say. Now let's get into the rest. This movie tried to launch the JSA and I think it fails. It fails because as far as team dynamics go, they pick the least interesting group of characters to work together that I've ever seen. You have a Hawkman. Dr. Fate. Whirling wind girl and not-Antman. The final two are apparently new to this team, so you have a bunch of rookies joining a fight that could have world ending consequences. Awesome. They barely know their own powers and so do we. We're not given much about them and they are here to be special effect showpieces at best. It's literally the worst team you could have sent after the most "powerful" person in the world.
They also really shoehorn Amanda Waller into this movie, to try and make this fit with the Suicide Squad and everything they have built so far. It just feels weird. If the JSA are heroes, why are they working with Amanda Waller, who it feels like everyone knows is evil, but just kinda deals with her anyway? It's flimsy.
Finally, the fight scenes and everything is just boring. There's nothing that we haven't seen before. Also, like all other movies DC does, they have to use a lot of cutesy slo-mo shots, that is beyond annoying at this point. You're trying to do Superman things without having Superman. Can we just get over this idea that Superman isn't cool? It's not his job, but this movie tries to build up Black Adam as the "cool" Superman and no one asked for that.
This movie is ultimately just unsatisfying. The Rock tried to use it as a springboard for new things, but it now sounds like those legs have been cut out from under him with the new regime coming in. Jamming in a Superman cameo at the end to get our hopes up, to ultimately lead no where is also extremely disappointing.
We can say what we want about Marvel movies being formulaic, but at least they have a formula. DC has been fumbling around for years and not choosing a tone that is consistent in all their movies. At first I applauded that, but hopefully the new regime can get these movies feeling more consistent with each other.
Hopefully everyone can say they got this out of their system and we can move on.
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