Black Adam

SnarkAI Score: 40/100

tldr:

The review highlights several issues with the movie, including a clunky and dull storyline, poor character development, and an inconsistent tone. While the visuals and cast are good, they do not make up for the flaws in the film. A score of 40 indicates that the movie is below average and not worth watching unless you are a die-hard fan of the genre or actors.

Our Scores are generated by SnarkAI's analysis of our reviewer's writing. The tldr sumary is drafted by SnarkAI based on that review. All Images are AI generated based on the reviewers descriptions of scenes.

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Deeply mediocre and it really shouldn't be.

It's visually great.

The cast is good, Fate (Brosnan sounding tired with everything and everyone), Hawkman (discount Kevin Hart), Cyclone (if you ordered Zendaya from Wish.com), and Atom Smasher (spare Ezra Miller) all have clear, distinct powers, and really fun execution of them.

Kahndaq feels really 'real' with the ruins as landmarks and restorations, but the story is clunky and dull (and I assume it was the Rock who said he should be a slave and not the Prince of Egypt from the actual character background).

The story goes through this weird attempt to make the Rock the hero even though he's an unrepentant psycho from the moment he's on screen is disappointing. There's like one moment of him adjusting to the new world (Mirrors are a new thing to him, he has no issue with guns, helicopters, televisions or cars) otherwise he's as modern as anyone else. And the cringe-inducing JSA announcement that 'we're here for Global Stability' is just silly, they may as well be saying 'we're here for the military-industrial complex, keep being subjugated peasants'.

An hour in and the stakes have never been lower. Literally, there are no stakes at this point in the film other than some obnoxious kid who has a serious deathwish, Adam squishing regular people, (who are members of intergang but have no way to hurt him) more for something to do than any real motivation from the character. The JSA are ineffectively wandering around occasionally fighting him or talking to him but mostly just bantering with each other. Adam also gets into the bantering. This is tonally odd for an ex-slave from 5,000 years ago who became a rage-fueled god. And then 20 seconds later he totally fails to understand humour. It's jarring. You can feel The Rock's manager pushing for "more quips! Marvel made a movie in a CAVE WITH QUIPS!" to try and reach their success rather than Snyders's deeply mediocre achievements.

The government's specialists in dealing with Meta Humans, Task Force X, just leave supervillains lying around the loading bay available for anyone to wander over to and has no training or weaponry to defeat a regular person let alone a supervillain.

Ugh and "this villain died clutching a mystical artifact specifically related to Death." "ok, cool, let's shove him in a bodybag and ignore him and leave it with him." Bringing back Adam once he's contained because 'he's the only one who can defeat the bad guy' when Superman exists and is explicitly referenced and shows up later as a favor to Waller is insanely daft and poorly scripted.

Shazam is the better Shazam movie and it's not even close.