‘Black Adam’ Review: The Rock Cuts Loose in Noisy Supervillain Spectacular
Those crazy fools, they finally did it. They put The Rock in a superhero movie. Cross the biggest action superstar with the most overblown effects-driven genre and you get Black Adam, a face-melting big screen spectacular.
This is peak blockbuster — for better and for worse.
So Black Adam is a ton of fun, if you like that sort of thing, headlined by a humorously homicidal antihero who puts an irreverent spin on the superhero formula. Playing a rare villain(ish) role, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is let loose to unleash carnage with a knowing smirk to camera.
From Black Adam’s skull-crushing entrance to a ludicrously violent riff on the super-speed sequences from the X-Men movies, the film delights in dealing out death and destruction (but y’know, in a fun way). Start to finish and through the inevitable post-credits scene, Black Adam is a guilty pleasure that isn’t even the slightest bit guilty.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Black Adam is released in theaters Friday, Oct. 21.
Story-wise, Johnson plays Teth-Adam, ancient champion of a perennially oppressed (fictional) Middle Eastern nation called Kahndaq. An introductory voice-over fills us in on his past, his powers and, of course, the magical superweapon everyone will be chasing. (This time, it’s the Crown of Something Or Other.)
Awakening in the present day, Adam is bemused by new-fangled progressive ideas like not melting people into skeletons for looking at him funny. A team of superheroes called The Justice Society is dispatched to take him down, plus an