So I saw Black Adam and… wow.
First something that will cushion this a bit for folks that liked it. My wife goes with me to see superhero and other fantasy adventure flicks and she really loved it. She doesn‘t dissect movies intellectually like I do. She just opened her mind to a good old fashioned popcorn superhero movie and was very entertained. She had a grand time.
As for me… not so much. First observation is that I was surprised by BA’s overall vibe or aesthetic, i.e., the approach to the superhero genre itself. It feels like something that was made more than 10 years ago, if not 20. Like it uses a stylistic approach to the genre that actually goes that far back. And as such it has an unmistakably camp feel. That was not a golden era of superhero films! The movies were pretty bad then! For most of us, Nolan‘s Batman trilogy and the MCU cleansed our pallet from all that. But BA beckons back to it. It’s such an odd choice. Superman Returns and Wonder Woman 84 try to recapture the innocent vibe of 1978 Superman and the 80s Wonder Woman TV show, and they fail, but there was something charming about those inspirations. The type of movie that BA is conjuring is from an era when the movies were just hokey.
I knew what I was in for in the first action scene that uses a pop tune for the soundtrack. I won’t spoil specifically, but I was involuntarily laughing out loud at it because it felt so forced to me. Unfortunately I was unable to put that toothpaste back into the tube. It set a template for me, a lens to watch the film through, that actually made the whole movie unintentionally hilarious to me. Especially in the context of it being the launch of “the new DCEU” and “Phase One” of that new era, etc. Johnson having labored over this film for over 10 years or what have you. Oh man, lol. In that aspect is it so bad it’s good.
I have more to say about the movie after wife and I go for a morning walk.