The 5 Biggest Problems With ‘Black Adam’

Games The 5 Biggest Problems With ‘Black Adam’ Erik Kain Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about video games, entertainment and culture. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Oct 25, 2022, 08:00am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Black Adam Credit: Warner Bros Black Adam has become the latest front in the never-ending pop culture wars, though I have to admit that whatever culture war ammunition you find in this movie probably says more about you than about the film itself. In any case, we have yet another divide in critic consensus and audience scores and it’s a pretty sizable one. At the time of this writing, 39% of critics vs 90% of normal viewers liked this movie , though the way Rotten Tomatoes keeps track of reviews muddies things a bit.

I’ve seen plenty of 3. 5 star reviews that sound mostly negative, but 3. 5 stars (out of 5) and above count as a positive review.

I have seen some audience reviews that proclaim they love the film because it isn’t “woke” and doesn’t shove a message down your throat. And hey, I’m totally fine with movies not shoving political messages down our throats, but the absence of that does not a good film make. (And, of course, there were political messages in the film, including anti-Western imperialism).

I found Black Adam mildly entertaining, and I went into it with fairly low expectations but rooting for it to be a success and prove the critics wrong. Sadly, while it wasn’t the worst DC movie ever it was another mediocre letdown. Here are the five biggest problems with Black Adam.

Spoilers ahead. 1. It’s generic and predictable.

MORE FOR YOU Juan Soto Contract Rejection Could Make Orioles A Better Buy Than Nationals Cyprus Could Transfer Its Russian Armaments To Ukraine If Guaranteed Speedy Replacements AI Ethics And AI Law Wrestling With AI Longtermism Versus The Here And Now Of AI This is my number one problem with Black Adam. It was just such a predictable movie. You could pretty much spell out exactly what would happen in the end within the first ten minutes.

When other superheroes go to stop Black Adam because he’s too powerful for the world, you know they won’t be able to unless he intentionally gives up. When he does that very thing, you know they’ll need to get him back to stop the Big Bad. And you can see the Big Bad coming a mile away.

Sure, Black Adam is more willing to kill people than most other heroes, but given the people he’s killing are all generic, heavily armed bad guys we never really have to explore whether this is, in fact, a moral dilemma. Ultimately, the plot amounts to a bunch of action scenes strung together with a bit of paper-thin characterization designed to create a freedom narrative that never really clicks. To add emotional resonance and give Black Adam a Reason To Be Good, the movie tosses in some non-superhero characters who we will refer to as Generic Mom, Generic Boy and Generic Funny Guy.

2. The Justice Society is wasted. We’re introduced to way too many new characters in this film.

Four of these are members of the Justice Society, which is like a B-Tier Justice League. We learn next to nothing about this group and even though we’re introduced to four DCEU superheroes, none of them are really fleshed out and the most interesting of the bunch is killed off. We’re introduced to Hawkman as though we already know all about him.

He appears to be rich. Maybe a Tony Stark-like character. Who can say? The movie certainly doesn’t.

Dr. Fate has some very cool powers (both the visual effects and what he can do with his predictive powers) but we barely scratch the surface. His and Hawkman’s friendship is something we learn a bit about through exposition, but is fundamentally too shallow for us to really care about.

When Dr. Fate is killed, it feels more like a waste of a potentially fascinating character rather than an emotional moment. Cyclone and her cool nano-bot powers are touched on only briefly, and Atom Smasher is included apparently just to be the butt of various jokes.

In the end, the group itself feels more like a joke than anything we should take seriously, and even that falls flat given we know next to nothing about any of these heroes. 3. The action scenes get tedious fast.

As I noted above, the story of Black Adam is mostly a bunch of action scenes strung together. Some of these are quite fun, but they start to wear thin quickly. Black Adam suffers from an overpowered hero that simply can’t be hurt by basically anything.

Even Superman has kryptonite to contend with. Black Adam can get wounded, but quickly bounces back to full strength. So we get a lot of repetition before the credits roll.

He takes out tons of mercenaries and then battles against the Justice Society and then fights more mercenaries and then fights the Justice Society again and finally, in the very end, faces the powerful demon king villain in a fight that can only go one way. None of these movies are ever bold enough to let the bad guy win in the end, so it’s all wrapped up nice and tidy. There’s simply no tension in any of the big fight scenes.

A virtually invulnerable hero who can’t be stopped even by other powerful heroes sounds good on paper, I guess, but in practice it’s just boring. 4. Black Adam isn’t a very good central protagonist.

This all leads to the problem with Black Adam as the star of his own movie. I like The Rock and I think he does a fine job here (though it’s weird that the ancient champion of Khandaq doesn’t have an accent). But do we really need an entire movie devoted to this character? Judging by what actually transpires in the film, I think the answer to that question is an obvious “No.

” I’d much rather have seen Black Adam introduced as an antagonist to the affable Shazam. Pitting Shazam and his goofy humor up against someone with similar powers who has no compunction about killing would have been far more interesting than the bland story here. 5.

The villain is a joke. At last, the villain. Much of the film centers around the mercenary group Intergang trying to find the Crown of Sabbac, a legendary relic made out of Eternium that can unleash untold powers of the underworld.

This crown was created 5,000 years ago when the champion first walked the earth, and somehow the bad guy in the present timeline knows that he’s related to this 5,000 years dead king. That alone is super goofy, as it would be nigh impossible to know if you were related to someone that long dead, but whatever. Once he gets the crown he gains the powers of the demons and turns into a fiery monstrosity who can raise an army of the dead to fight alongside him.

The skeletal warriors, however, are completely useless, easily taken down by a rabble of town-folk who Generic Boy rallies to fight using the same symbol as the boy champion from 5,000 years ago (because most modern societies totally cling to 5,000 year-old traditions!) Black Adam takes out the Big Bad about as easily as the good citizens of Khandaq stomp his mookish minions. Again, there’s very little tension here. The Big Bad’s motives are as generic as the rest of the film.

Nobody has to make any particularly difficult choices. We lose a main character but it’s a character we’ve barely gotten to know in a movie with too many characters to possibly get to know. I’m grateful the film was only 2 hours long, but even those two hours felt longer than they should have.

Pretty CGI and endless action sequences might be good enough for the uncritical moviegoing masses, but we’ve seen all of this before. I want a good story that makes me actually care about the characters and their fates, and on that front Black Adam fails to deliver. Watch my video review below : As always, I’d love it if you’d follow me here on this blog and subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can stay up-to-date on all my TV, movie and video game reviews and coverage.

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