Black Adam
[info headline="Release date"]7 December 2018[/info]
[info headline="Language"]English, Hindi[/info]
[info headline="IMDb Rating"]7.4[/info]
[info headline="Genre"]Action, Fantasy, Science Fiction[/info]
[info headline="Cast"]Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson[/info]
[button src="#"]Download Now[/button]
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, and featuring a remarkable
lead performance by Dwayne Johnson, the spiky and majestic "Black
Adam" is one of the best DC superhero films to date. This tale of a
gloomy, seemingly malevolent god who reappears in a long-occupied Middle
Eastern nation rejects most of the choices that bland-ify even the good entries
in the genre. For its first third, it presents its title character—a champion
who challenged a despotic king thousands of years earlier—as a frightening and
unknowable force with a bottomless appetite for destruction. Known by his
ancient moniker Teth-Adam, his reemergence from a desert tomb proves both a
miracle and a curse for people who prayed for someone to defend them against
corporate-mercenary thugs who have oppressed them for decades and strip-mined
their land.
Throughout the rest of its running time, “Black Adam” leans
into the inevitability of Adam’s evolution toward good-guy status, condensing
the transformation of the title character in the first two “Terminator” films
(there are even comic bits where people try to teach Adam sarcasm and the
Geneva Conventions). "Black Adam" then stirs in dollops of a macho
sentimentality that used to be common in old Hollywood dramas about loners who
needed to get involved in a cause to reset their moral compasses or recognize
their worth. But the sharp edge that the film brings to the early parts of its
story never dulls.
Adam initially seems as much of a literal as well as a
figurative force of nature as Godzilla and other beasts in Japanese kaiju
films. It’s initially hard for the people in Adam’s path to tell if he’s good,
evil, or merely indifferent to human concerns. One thing’s for sure: everyone
wants Adam to help them prevent a crown forged in hell and infused with the
energy of six demons from being placed atop the head of someone in Intergang, a
global corporate/mercenary consortium whose interests are represented by a
two-faced charmer (Marwan Kenzari).
Decades ago, Humphrey Bogart played a lot of cynical men who
insisted they weren’t interested in causes, then changed their minds and took
up arms against corruption or tyranny. Viewers still love that story, and
Johnson has updated it many times during his career, most recently in “Jungle
Cruise,” in which he played a character modeled on Bogart's riverboat captain
in "The African Queen." He channels vintage primordial acting by
Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger but also poet-brute performances like
Anthony Quinn's strongman in "La Strada," and infuses the totality
with his unique charisma. "Black Adam" confirms that he’s studied the
classics and cherry-picked bits that seem to work for him. There are even
tenderhearted moments of regret and recrimination that seem inspired by 1950s
moral awakening pictures like “On the Waterfront.”
The latter are usually triggered by three “civilian”
characters who appeal to Adam’s presumed innate (though submerged) goodness.
One is Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi), a university professor, resistance
fighter, and widow of a resistance hero who was killed by the colonizers.
Another is Adrianna’s cheerful and indomitable son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), who
zips around the bombed-out city on a skateboard that seems to have as many
secondary uses as a Swiss Army Knife. And then there’s Adrianna’s brother Amir (comedian
Mohammed Amer), who livens up a standard-issue earthy everyman role.
Somehow, though, the script by Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines,
and Sohrab Noshirvani resists the temptation to wallow in unearned sentiment.
Nor does the movie insist, despite the evidence, that Adam and the superheroes
brought into to confront him (Aldis Hodge’s Hawkman, Noah Centineo’s Atom
Smasher, Quintessa Swindell’s wind-manipulating Cyclone, and Pierce Brosnan’s
dimension-hopping and clairvoyant Dr. Fate) are wonderful people who have pure
motives and always mean well. In conversations about motivations and tactics,
nobody is entirely right or wrong. The movie's edge comes from its
determination to live in moral gray areas as long as it can.
It also comes from the violence, which is presented as the
inevitable result of the characters’ personalities, ambitions, and duties,
rather than being associated with any particular code or philosophy. That
framing, plus the sprays of blood and images of people being impaled, shot, and
crushed, pushes the movie's PG-13 rating to the breaking point like “Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Gremlins” did with the PG rating nearly 40
years earlier. There were several walkouts at the “Black Adam” screening this
writer attended, and in every case, it was somebody who brought a child under
10.
In fairness, they may not have expected the movie to begin
with a flashback that climaxes with a slave at a construction site getting
gut-stabbed and thrown off a cliff, and a boy being threatened with beheading,
or for the title character to obliterate an army with electrical bolts and his
bare hands seconds after his first appearance. Nearly every other
scene—including expository dialogue exchanges—is set against the backdrop of a
chaotic city whose residents have been hardened not just by the occupation, but
by the catastrophes that are unleashed whenever super-beings clash, which ties
into recurring scenes and dialogue about what it means for a small country to
be invaded and occupied by outsiders who set their own rules and are
indifferent to daily life on the ground.
Film history buffs might note the studio that originated the
project: the Warner Bros. subdivision New Line. It rose to prominence with
horror films, grew by releasing auteur-driven, down-and-dirty genre pieces and
dramas (including “Menace II Society” and “Deep Cover”), and got into
blockbusters with the original “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. You can see that
lineage reflected in many scenes and sequences of this film, which is PG-13 in
fact but R in spirit. “Black Adam” immediately announces what sort of film it
is by weaving in quotes from the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” (the melody
of which is referenced in Lorne Balfe’s score) and musical as well as visual
snippets from “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”—key works from artists whose
best work invites you to root for people who move through their worlds like
threshers.
The film’s director honed his mayhem chops in horror movies,
then in R-rated thrillers in which Liam Neeson brutally dispatches adversaries.
Collet-Serra makes a PG-13 film feel like an R by cutting away or jumping back
from the nastiest violence, but letting us hear it (or imagine it when people
watch from a great distance). He also does it by insisting, through actions as
well as dialogue, that individuals, even superhuman ones, do things for
multiple, often contradictory reasons. (A boy’s bedroom is filled with
superhero posters and comics, and when a “good guy” and Adam fight in there,
they burn and tear through DC’s most recognizable icons in a way that rhymes
with scenes of the city's historic monuments being toppled or pulverized.)
Fidelity to basic film storytelling keeps "Black
Adam" centered even when it's doing ten things at once. The film is packed
with foreshadowings, setups, payoffs, twists, and surprises, and is filled with
well-defined lead and supporting characters. One standout is Brosnan, who
delivers a moving portrait of an immortal who is tired of seeing the future and
thinking back on his past. Dr. Fate looks at those who can live in the present
with a mixture of melancholy, wisdom, and envy.
Another is Johnson, who has real acting chops but in recent
years has often seemed to be constrained (maybe intimidated?) by his lucrative
image as the people’s colossus. He’s as minimalist as one could be when playing
a god. He takes a lot of his cues from the screen star that the film quotes
most often, Clint Eastwood, but he also seems to have learned from action-hero
performances by stars like Neeson, Toshiro Mifune, Stallone, Schwarzenegger,
and Charles Bronson, who understood that the camera can detect and amplify
faint tremors of emotion as long as you act with the film—not just in it, and
never against it. The peak is a fleeting moment when Johnson lets us know that
something deep inside Adam has changed by glancing in a different direction and
softening his features. It's maybe half a second. It’s not the kind of acting
that wins prizes because if it’s done well—as it is here—you feel as if it
happened in your mind rather than on the screen.
The politics and spirituality of the movie are just as
committed and consistent. Even when the story flirts with Orientalism or
incorporates simplistic Western heaven-and-hell imagery, “Black Adam” never
loses track of what Adam represents in our world: autonomy, liberation, the
possibility of redemption and renewal, and a refusal to be defined by however
things have always been done.
The result sometimes plays like the DC answer to the pop
culture quake that was “Black Panther,” serving up a Middle Eastern-inflected
version of the Marvel film’s Afro-Futurist sensibility, and letting its setting
stand in for any place that was colonized. But its politics are more clearly
defined and less compromised. “Black Adam” is staunchly anti-imperialist to its
marrow, even equating the Avengers-like crew sent to capture and imprison Black
Adam to a United Nations “intervention” force that the people of the region
don’t want because it only makes things worse. The movie is anti-royalist, too,
which is even more of a surprise considering that the backstory hinges on kings
and lineage.
"Black Adam" is a superlative and clever example
of this sort of movie, coloring within the lines while drawing fascinating
doodles on the margins. In its brash, relentless, overscaled way,
Collet-Serra's film respects its audience and wants to be respected by it.
"Black Adam" gives the audience everything they wanted, along with
things they never expected.
Only in theaters today.
0 comments:
Post a Comment