So if this movie confirmed anything it was one thing, Dwayne Johnson isn't a real movie star, he simply cannot carry a top-tier movie. Johnson merely seems to be the ultimate ensemble actor who can boost a franchise, but on his own, he simply ain't got the chops. The new Arnie he certainly is not, confirmed.
This character was supposed to be in the original 'Shazam!' movie but due to Johnson's ego he managed to get his own project focusing purely on his muscles...I mean the character. Further to that, this version of the movie was originally gonna have the character Shazam (from the original movie) as the protagonist/antagonist for Black Adam to fight, but again Johnson's ego got the better of him as he wanted the story to focus on him and Black Adam. And thus a problem was born. Add to the fact that DC movies generally don't do well anyway and voila!
Plot wise the whole thing is so basic and generic with little imagination in my opinion. Black Adam is accidentally resurrected from his tomb by a strong female character trying to uncover an ancient mcguffin. Black Adam is seen as a bad guy thusly the Justice Leag...sorry Justice Society (a precursor to the League) is called into action to bring him down. After much terrible CGI fighting Black Adam is found to not actually be evil but somewhat misunderstood (shocking) and they now need his help to take down the generic big evil end-of-level boss (at the end of the movie). So essentially it's just the same old guff with different characters (imagine that).
The main issue I found with this movie was the simple fact that most of the runtime is made up of the Justice Society fighting Black Adam, and that's it! The entire movie is set within this fictional ancient city which merely looks like somewhere in Egypt or the Middle East and nothing much else really happens. We just get lots of the usual superhero battle sequences involving lots of super punching and super throwing either into things or through things. No one ever seems to realise that these attacks aren't working but they just keep doing it because there's nothing else they can do, ugh! (wash rinse and repeat). The CGI effects are overall pretty terrible to boot which doesn't help matters. Everything is SO obviously CGI with that nasty plastic rubbery-looking gloss stuck alongside obvious-looking bluescreen shots and obvious sets. It sounds cliche but everything just looks like a videogame sequence. It just doesn't look convincing at all and in this day and age I simply expect more because I know it can be so much better.
Black Adam himself suffers the same problem any Dwayne Johnson movie suffers, Dwayne Johnson. In that I mean Johnson simply cannot act beyond his persona and he ALWAYS comes across as Dwayne Johnson in a costume, whatever that might be. You want a fun comedy romp in a jungle, or a ridiculous action flick with glimmering muscles then he's perfect, but that's it. Johnson trying to play it dark and murdering people just doesn't work because it just doesn't suit him. For the time being, he simply doesn't have the range.
As for other characters, let's quickly talk about the Justice Society. Boy oh boy do these guys suck ass. I mean seriously, talk about the poor man's Avengers. The bottom-of-the-barrel superheroes. We couldn't afford any decent characters or there weren't any good ones left so we had to use these guys, geez!! Hawkman looks ridiculous with his bird-shaped helmet adorned with feathers, he's also been race-swapped. I guess his super power is mainly flight? I guess that's useful for...flying. As her name suggests Cyclone controls the wind (Ugh!). Seems kinda useless and funnily enough she doesn't really do much in the movie because how's that effective against a Superman-type character like Black Adam? She's also race-swapped. Atom Smasher has the ability to grow to an enormous size like a giant, again pretty useless in the movie. And last but not least the poor man's Dr. Strange...Doctor Fate who funnily enough has virtually the same set of powers, I think, I'm not a comic expert. And yes I realise some of these characters appeared before their Marvel counterparts but I always found it funny and stupid how both Marvel and DC have essentially characters that mirror each other. They even have their X-Men-type ship to fly around in that is stored in their own X-Men-type mansion.
I guess the biggest disappointment here is after all the cookie-cutter crap I had to sit through to get to the cookie-cutter finale, the big bad guy turned out to be this laughable looking Devil/Satan-esque character that looked like he was getting ready to fight Sub-Zero. Talk about videogame looking nonsense Jesus! Literally everything in this movie was the most generic of generic superhero poop I've seen so far. You could have literally had ANY superhero character in here and it wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever. The human characters were completely inconsequential, much like the plot really. And naturally you had Marvel-esque quips (which totally underscored the tone) because DC is always playing catchup despite that Marvel aspect now losing favour.
I didn't really expect much here, at this point it merely feels like they are churning out superhero movies of any and all characters simply to keep the wagon rolling. This movie is literally the epitome of cookie-cutter, paint by numbers, off the factory line etc...There is nothing here that is original and nothing here that needed to be shown. This movie simply didn't need to be made. A Dwayne Johnson vanity project that admittedly could have been something as we've all been wondering how The Rock would fair in a cape, but somehow he screwed it up and all we have left is a plain boring superhero clone of a movie. That Superman credit scene will also go down in cinematic history as one of the biggest 'what if' dead ends ever (bit like Skeletor in 'Master of the Universe'). An open ending to something that will probably now never happen.
4/10
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