BLACK ADAM (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Close to the end of BLACK ADAM, the actors playing superhero Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and archaeologist Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) get to utter two of the stupidest lines ever written for a superhero film.

HAWKMAN: "The kind of justice you [Black Adam] dish out can darken your soul."

ADRIANNA: "It's his darkness that lets him do what heroes like you cannot."

Now, some exchange like this might make sense if the preceding movie had incarnated the "rough justice" of,say, Marvel's Punisher, whose 1989 movie sports the tagline "If society won't punish the guilty, he will." But BLACK ADAM constantly vacillates between championing rough justice and advocating the more nuanced crime-fighting approach of the "heroes" Adrianna criticizes, the Justice Society, or at least the four members of the Society seen in this movie. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and his three writers want to have it both ways. They want audiences to cheer when Adam and the JSA join forces against a common enemy that endangers the whole Earth, as would be the case in a normative superhero film. But they also want to "virtue signal" by implying that the script has made some incisive sociopolitical critique of superheroes. I might not think the 2018 BLACK PANTHER is a good film, but at least the whole film is utterly straightforward in its devotion to crafting a sociopolitical message.

Some background: in the comics Black Adam first appeared in one Golden Age comic, MARVEL FAMILY #1 (1945). He started as an Egyptian named Teth-Adam, and the wizard Shazam endowed him with the power to fight evil. Teth-Adam promptly made himself Pharaoh, at which point Shazam renamed him "Black Adam" to denote his evil nature, and then banished him from Earth. After battling the Marvel Family in that story, he was not revived until DC Comics acquired the characters of their former comics-rival Fawcett and began re-publishing the original Captain Marvel and other Fawcett properties. In the 1980s all the Fawcett characters joined the DC mainstream and Black Adam was revised. He was no longer a scion of ancient Egypt, but of a fictional Middle Eastern country, Kandahq, and in due time he becomes a more ambivalent figure, with aspects of both heroism and villainy. The film takes elements from a 2004 comics-continuity, BLACK REIGN, in which Adam, who briefly served in the Justice Society, decided to overthrow the native rulers of Kandahq with a handful of allies-- one of whom is the hero "Atom Smasher." This provokes other members of the Society to attack Adam and his allies to keep them from invading neighboring countries. The story ends with Adam and the JSA forging a peace agreement based on the understanding that Adam will not venture beyond Kandahq's borders.

The movie ADAM essentially blends elements of the character's origin with the main plot of REIGN. Teth-Adam is still born in ancient Kandahq. At the time the reigning tyrant Ahk-Ton seeks to make his power insuperable by forging a magical talisman, the Crown of Sabbac. Ahk-Ton's reign is destroyed and the Crown of Sabbac is lost. Modern-day archaeologist Adrianna has only a sketchy idea of a powerful hero who defeated Ahk-ton, but her primary goal is locate the Crown. She hopes to use its power to oust a foreign occupying force from control of Kandahq, but the foreign tyrants, known only as "Intergang," also want the Crown, and they suborn one of her assistants, Ishmael, into betraying Adrianna's quest. Cornered by Intergang soldiers, Adrianna reads an ancient incantation and releases from 5,000 years of slumber Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson). Because the reborn Adam displays the same powers as modern-day Shazam-- super-strength, invulnerability, and magical lightning-- Adrianna and her superhero-happy son Amon assume that Teth-Adam is the ancient hero who fought Ahk-ton. Adrianna also gets hold of the Crown of Sabbac, but her primary purpose is not to use it, but to keep it out of the hands of Intergang and the traitor Ishmael.

Before proceeding to the second act, I have to note that there's no intrinsic reason for the evil current rulers of Kandahq to be outsiders. In BLACK REIGN Adam and his allies overthrow an evil local ruler, but I suspect the writers of ADAM wanted to make some loose critique of colonialism. But the script does not provide even a rough history of how these invaders-- given the name of a criminal organization in various DC comics-- insinuated themselves into power. This should be an important plot-point, because in various speeches Adrianna slams the Justice Society for not having ousted Intergang's corrupt regime. Yet if they're only a criminal gang as in the comics, there's no reason the Society would not have done so. The only way that U.S.-based heroes would have withheld their powers from intervention would be if Intergang had an alliance with some hypothetical Second-World or Third-World power. But the writers clearly hoped that audiences would ignore sociopolitical realities and simply cheer mindlessly when the reborn Adam started killing off Intergang soldiers.

The film then diverges into two plotlines. Amon, who is a fan of American superheroes and wants Kandahq to have its own champion, tries to convince Adam to be that hero. Since the ancient Kandahqian seems to be utterly remorseless and bereft of affect, Amon has only minimal success. However, four members of the Justice Society are sent into the country to overpower Adam, who for vague reasons is perceived as a cosmic threat to humanity. Said heroes are Hawkman, Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell). As noted above, Atom Smasher was in BLACK REIGN as one of Black Adam's allies. I believe Cyclone is an original creation of the movie, though since she sports the surname "Hunkel," she's implicitly related to "Ma Hunkel," the Original Red Tornado from the comics, a spoofy costumed character who crossed paths with the JSA once or twice.

I can't complain that the movie doesn't have a lot of wild fight-scenes, though since the movie flopped at the box office, it would appear that this attraction wasn't enough to make viewers pony up, any more than they cared about seeing Johnson step outside his usual role as "the musclebound teddy bear." But everything in between the fights is pedestrian. Adrianna and the JSA have their respective agendas and they remain tied to them, while Adam is something of a bone over which they contend, even while playing a parallel game of "crown, crown, who's got the crown." Eventually Ishmael is able to acquire the Crown and call upon the power of Sabbac, transforming himself into a red-devil monster and almost defeating all the heroes (as well as killing one of them in a blatantly telegraphed plot-point). The movie does end roughly in the same manner as the graphic novel, with Adam remaining confined to the borders of Kandahq (though not as the country's ruler) and the fate of the Intergang soldiers left up in the air (unless the movie meant to suggest that Adam killed them all).

Johnson was attached to the role of Black Adam as far back as 2014, though possibly the original concept was to have him fight the Original Captain Marvel. This plodding concoction doesn't really justify whatever suspense it created, though admittedly Johnson, Hodge and Brosnan all look pretty good incarnating their respective roles. The plot's "big reveal" is the truth of Adam's relatedness to Kandahq's ancient hero, but the script fails to give this development any emotional tonality. Adrianna, Amon and Adrianna's comedy-relief brother Karim are all just functions of the plot with no charm of their own, and the eleventh-hour revelation that Ishmael is the descendant of Ahk-Ton is a pathetic excuse for a "secondary reveal." I assume the majority of Justice League characters were put off limits by other projects, though I guess Superman gets a cameo since he didn't have any irons in the fire. A couple of SUICIDE SQUAD characters are needlessly interpolated and serve only to make the JSA look compromised by nebulous political influences.