Black Adam

The Hierarchy of Posture

There is a very particular way Dwayne Johnson floats in *Black Adam*. He doesn’t glide like Superman or blast forward like Iron Man. He just hangs there. Upright. Arms folded. Chest inflated to cartoon proportions. Neck swallowed by his own traps. I spent an alarming amount of this weary two-hour movie watching his posture, mostly because the script gives you so little else to enjoy. For fifteen years Johnson said this passion project would change the hierarchy of power in the DC universe. What it really changes is the arrangement of the digital rubble.



I’m still not sure what Jaume Collet-Serra thought he was making. In those lean Liam Neeson thrillers like *Non-Stop*, he had a knack for keeping trashy tension taut and contained. Give him a superhero budget, though, and all that discipline seems to evaporate. The film drops us into Kahndaq, a fictional Middle Eastern nation under the boot of a mercenary force called Intergang. There’s a genuinely interesting political question buried in there somewhere: what happens when an occupied people finally get a savior, and that savior is a merciless killer? That’s a question that needs shading and thought. The movie answers it with slow-motion lightning.

Take Teth-Adam’s awakening. Mercenaries crowd around his tomb, he rises from the dust like an avenging statue, and then he starts erasing people. He catches a rocket. He detonates it. He fries a man down to a skeleton. The camera stares at all of it with the glee of a teenager discovering the replay button. Men go sailing skyward in syrupy slow motion so we can admire the trajectory. It plays less like the birth of a superhero and more like a slasher movie with a cape. Phil Pirrello at The AV Club had it right when he called the whole thing "a brooding, weightless CG punch-a-thon". That first massacre tells you exactly what kind of movie this will be: loud, slick, and frictionless.



Casting Dwayne Johnson as a humorless anti-hero turns out to be a strange act of self-sabotage, because the one thing that reliably makes him watchable is his charm. Strip away the grin and the timing, and you’re left with a granite block delivering every line in a strained gravel growl, like he’s fighting off a sneeze. You can see the effort clamped in his jaw. It’s all surface and muscle, no feeling.

Because Johnson plants himself so firmly in that statue mode, the burden of actual acting falls to the supporting cast. The Justice Society arrives as a kind of imperial cleanup squad, sent by the U.S. government to put Kahndaq’s new weapon back in storage. Aldis Hodge’s Hawkman brings some much-needed tension. He squares himself up, lowers his chin, and tries with all his might to project moral certainty into a void of green screen and collapsing buildings. Pierce Brosnan, meanwhile, gives Doctor Fate a lovely worn-down sadness. He barely pushes. He just lets those tired eyes do the work, and suddenly you believe he’s seen enough futures to know they’re mostly bad news.



Maybe I’m being unfair. The movie is certainly noisy enough to keep you conscious, and the costumes at least register against the muddy color palette. But leaving the theater, what I felt most was emptiness. *Black Adam* doesn’t play like a story about gods, people, or even comic-book archetypes. It feels like a spreadsheet given mass and lighting. A monument to one star’s self-image, erected on digital dust, pointing straight toward the reboot that inevitably came after.