...In case you’re wondering, that first
paragraph is also a stand-in for the premise
of this awfully staged DC movie. Black
Adam is listed as the 11th film of
the “DC Extended Universe,” but it may as
well have been the 250th — because
originality is the kryptonite (or, in this
case, Eternium) of franchise-obsessed
Hollywood studios. Originality is that rare
Bronze Age mineral everyone seemingly fights
for but nobody gets, while legacies and
sensibilities and creativity and coherence
become collateral damage in the mad dash to
CGI power. It is the mineral at the center
of this plot, too, only to be sacrificed in
the film’s hot pursuit of introducing yet
another beefcake superstar into the genre
fold. They may have convinced Dwayne “The
Rock” Johnson to (officially) play a
superhuman, but I suspect it’s just a
if-you-can’t-kill-em-hire-em studio ploy to
stop his one-man-action career from eating
into the superhero space. It’s like a tech
behemoth buying out an annoyingly persistent
start-up. Everyone wins, except the
consumers.
Black Adam believes it’s different
because it’s based on a superhero (or
supervillain; what’s the difference anyway?)
who has no patience for the political
correctness and virginal violence of the
contemporary superhero landscape. He is
rooted in the Middle East (with an American
accent). He scoffs at the Justice Society of
America (JSA), a four-hero Avengers-wannabe
squad dispatched to ‘subdue’ him and restore
peace — but more visibly a surrogate for
righteous-but-opportunistic Western
militarisation in the war-torn region. The
occupied city of Kahndaq — a hybrid of
Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq,
Palestine — has no patience for
peace-mongering anymore. Black Adam murders
— the people he kills just happen to be
militants from a Taliban-like outfit called
the Intergang, and so the citizens consider
him their Champion in a world obsessed with
diplomacy and sanitised punishment. The
message of the film is controversial but
frank, especially because it’s not Black
Adam who is built to compromise on his
ancient ideals; it’s eventually the JSA that
starts to see the light of his methods in
context of where he comes from. One person’s
prison is another’s death penalty, and all
that jazz.
Yet, despite being bestowed with all the
readymade risks and moral edginess that DC
has desperately tried to co-opt over the
years, Black Adam is shockingly
tropey in the way it goes about building its
case. I haven’t even seen the several
thousand spin-offs and Extended Universe
titles in the last decade, but it still felt
like I was watching a two-hour version of
the Marvel flipbook intro — where every
pre-existing page and conflict and theme and
set piece is reproduced and cooked to utter
imperfection. Nothing from X-Men to
The Dark Knight to
Avengers to even Krrish is
spared in Black Adam’s quest for generic
immortality. (I’m kidding about Krrish. Or
am I?). It’s futile to use the done-to-death
grammar of all the superhero stories you set
out to deconstruct, but Black Adam
insists that the non-license to kill is
enough to make it stand out. Has it not met
2022 yet?
Take, for instance, the team tasked with
taming this alleged villain. There’s the
leader, Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), whose only
real power is dissuading us from comparing
him to Captain America. There’s the British
sorcerer with a magic helmet, Doctor Fate
(Pierce Brosnan), whose only real power is
encouraging us to not compare him to Doctor
Strange. There’s Atom Smasher (Noah
Centineo), who has the powers of AntMan and
Hulk but the personality of Tom Holland’s
adult-adolescent Spiderman. And there’s
Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), the token
female presence who can produce green wind
at will (it’s not what you think). By
forgetting about her every other minute,
however, the film reveals her other
inadvertent power: disappearing into thin
air. The heart of the plot is a local
resistance fighter named Adrianna (a
way-too-intense Sarah Shahi), whose plan to
prevent the cryptic Crown of Sabbac from
falling into corrupt hands becomes
intertwined with the abduction of her
#sk8erboi son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), yet
another comic-obsessed teenager who exists
to fall into trouble. Amon idolises Black
Adam like I once idolised The Rock in the
WWE Attitude Era.
Which brings me to the boulder-sized
elephant in the room. Given his
“electrifying” career as a wrestling star
with a penchant for raised eyebrows and
verbal swag, it’s a wonder how little Dwayne
Johnson does on screen under the pretext of
a fossilised/bemused/numbed personality. He
is, literally, the People’s Champion here.
But his facial inertia, even by the
rock-bottom standards of new-age action
heroes (or the requirements of a plot that
plops him into a future he can’t fathom), is
a sight to behold — particularly when Black
Adam spends his spare time staring at a
giant statue of his 5,000-year-old self,
making it impossible to distinguish between
the concrete structure and the human slab of
stone. I suppose this is what passes off as
box-office charisma these days. It’s what
took this ageless pebble to the top of
Hollywood, but with this film he seems to
have reached a stage where he assumes that
simply showing up is a job done; his face
stays unmoved, whether he’s flying,
punching, killing or feeling. Black Adam is
a complicated character — most wronged
villains and heroes are — but the actor
reduces him to a visual punchline in a film
replete with post-DC self-seriousness.
The fatigue reached a point where I stopped
concentrating on the screen and instead
reimagined the DC-Marvel war as the vintage
wrestling feud between the Nation of
Domination (led by The Rock) and
D-Generation X (led by Triple H). Back then,
the Nation of Domination was disbanded once
The Rock was marked out by the scriptwriters
for bigger things — an event that does not
augur well for an ailing DC franchise that
keeps making Batman over and over
again in its search for angsty competence.
Once I finished exploring this parallel
universe in my own head, I became more alive
to the world around me. Like the gym fiend
sitting to my right who — apart from cursing
the calories of the cheesy nachos he bought
— sounded like the sort of gentleman who
thinks that speaking to the screen and
repeating dialogue are the best ways to
impress the woman he’s with. “20 minutes
tops,” he warned her in his freshest
mating-call voice before the screening, “the
film has 20 minutes to impress us, otherwise
we’re gonna bounce, babe!”. Two hours later,
he was still there. The only thing bouncing
was the nuts and bolts holding my brain
together, even as the post-credits sequence
triggered a cheer that — in this age of
corporatised curiosity — resembled a lesser
groan.
Black Adam is now in
theatres.
***
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