Black Adam (2022)

You can tell that a movie is going to premiere to mixed reviews when the trailer is out way too early and way too often. Black Adam has saturated the market for the past two months. Hell, Dwayne Johnson sang a country song on Kelly Clarkson's show. He must be desperate to get the word out to soccer moms and that does smack of being awful needy.

On first viewing Black Adam is a mess of a film. It wants to throw so much content up on the screen and every dollar of the CGI budget is right up there. Too many fights scenes that all look the same with an ending that was never in any doubt. Once we establish who all the characters are they all get to live till the end with only one exception. No surprises here, no interesting character backstories and an only average script with too many ideas that remain underdeveloped. 

That doesn't mean, however, that the movie is boring. It's not. It just treads ground we have all walked before. For a superhero film with nearly non-stop action, I expected to like it more than I did.

Dwayne Johnson plays a larger than life character in much that same way he plays all his larger than life characters. It's not so much that he becomes Teth Adam, he just gives us more of his 'Rock' persona, only with superpowers.

I appreciated seeing the Justic Society in this incarnation because we have never seen these characters in the movies before. Why does it feel like I am watching the CW then? The CW with many many slow motion scenes?

The movie is less exiting than it promises to be in the advertising. Better to wait for this one to reach a streaming service before investing your time. For completists only.

Seemingly exists to keep visual effects companies busy or set-up the inevitable next entry and the superhero punch-up to end all superhero punch-ups (until the next superhero punch-up, of course).