DC’s Black Adam is undoubtedly a passion project for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He’s been attached to it is some form or another for about fifteen years, with the initial plan to use him as a villain in the Shazam movie. Believing in the promise of the character, Johnson help out until he could get a movie of his own, and indeed Black Adam is among the most ambitious movies the star has ever made, with everyone’s goal clearly to spin this off into a major franchise for all involved. In the end, Black Adam is an entertaining superhero epic, but it’s also a movie that feels like it’s been focus-grouped to death, or reverse engineered to be the biggest hit possible, which is all well and good, but it lacks the personal touch that have made other DC movies, including Joker, The Batman and even the Snyder-verse, so compelling. Like them or now, one can’t say the Snyder-movies were anything but a distinct vision, even if people didn’t care for it. Here, Black Adam takes a page out of the MCU handbook, with this an origin tale that also functions as a way to introduce a whole bunch of characters DC is likely trying to spin-off, and the result is that Black Adam, too often, feels like a supporting character in his own movie.
