Early reviews for Dwayne Johnson's highly anticipated Black Adam movie have started to come out as the DC icon makes his DCEU debut this week.
With Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam movie being released this week, early reviews have started rolling in from the critics. After being cast as Black Adam over a decade ago, Johnson's long-awaited solo film is finally opening worldwide, as the DCEU will introduce the iconic DC character. Originally Johnson was going to appear as Black Adam in Shazam!. Still, after seeing the early scripts, the actor persuaded Warner Bros. to let the two characters star in their own respective films before clashing on the big screen.
For several years, Black Adam has been one of Warner Bros.'s most hyped-up superhero projects, as Johnson has stressed that it will forever change "the hierarchy of power" in the DCEU. While the studio has been dealing with changes behind-the-scenes for their DC properties, Black Adam is being envisioned as a new chapter for the franchise besides telling Teth-Adam's grim origin story. The DCEU installment will also see the big-screen introduction of the Justice Society of America, the Golden Age team that originally predates the Justice League in the comics.
As Black Adam is hitting theaters in a few days in multiple countries, several members of the press have been able to screen Johnson's film in advance, giving audience members early impressions. Check out several spoiler-free samples of what reviewers say about Johnson's Black Adam movie.
Rachel LeBonte, Screen Rant
Black Adam isn't necessarily the smartest superhero movie, nor is it the most entertaining. However, it's still a fairly compelling introduction to one of the more intriguing characters to emerge from the DCEU. Johnson has been working to get Black Adam made for years now, and his passion for the project is evident from almost the very beginning. Its action-packed nature can be exhausting, and certain characters beg for more attention, but as an origin story for Teth-Adam, it succeeds in upending what viewers might've expected from Johnson's live-action superhero debut.
Ross Bonaime, Collider
Black Adam isn’t a full-on course correction for the DCEU, but it is an encouraging new installment in this larger universe. Collet-Serra knows how to present this darkness and antihero in a way that’s effective, while also fleshing out one of the most promising additions to DC’s ever-expanding cadre of characters. Johnson is also a welcome part of this world, and while the DCEU has attempted to bring moral ambiguity to characters like Superman in ways that weren’t entirely successful, Black Adam allows DC to play in this darkness with an antihero that doesn’t betray their world or characters. Black Adam might not be the hero the DCEU needs, but it’s a welcome shift for this larger world and an invigorating look at the potential going forward in this universe.
Peter Debruge, Variety
The movie is essentially “Shane” on steroids, set in the Middle East instead of the Old West, but still seen through the eyes of a young boy — Adrianna’s comic book-obsessed son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), in this case — who idolizes a figure of questionable morality. As with “Shane,” sticking a kid in the middle of the story brings the entire project down to a middle-school-level intellect. And yet, except for the recent Batman movies, that’s how most of the DC films feel.
John Defore, The Hollywood Reporter
Johnson creates a magnetic antihero, volatile and antisocial. He doesn’t fly so much as stalk the sky; he swats opponents like the bundles of weightless CG pixels they are. And this passion project serves the character well, setting him up for adventures one hopes will be less predictable than this one. And maybe, while Teth Adam slowly assembles a coherent moral worldview over the course of many movies, America can grow out of its appalling tendency to elect celebrities with no experience in making governments work. Sadly, that’ll take more than wizards and magic rocks.
Gregg Katzman, Comic Book Resources
For viewers that want popcorn entertainment, Black Adam delivers and sets up something that could be really exciting for the future of the DCEU. It's unclear how the DCEU will capitalize on this, even with The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods slated for 2023. For now, Black Adam has done enough to ensure that viewers will be eager to see what the character does next in the DCEU. Fingers crossed that they're heading toward something loosely inspired by World War III or Kingdom Come...
Todd McCarthy, Deadline Hollywood
What’s most important here is securely planting the flag for subsequent installments of Black Adam adventures, and that it would seem to do. The visual spectacle just keeps coming at you for two hours, and the effects are all so stupendous that you could begin to take it for granted. Practically every shot features something epic or at least unusual going on and director Jaume Collet-Serra, who guided Johnson’s 2020 hit Jungle Cruise, takes good care to present the star in the most favorable dramatic light. The Rock is always the center of attention of any scene he’s in, and there’s every reason to believe that he’ll soon push ahead to create a string of Black Adam films and make up for lost time.
David Ehrlich, IndieWire
The problem isn’t that Johnson can’t act — he definitely can! — the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He still wants the simple idolatry that a kid might have for their favorite athlete. He wants to be larger than life. But even the biggest of movie stars need to be a little smaller than that in order to give people something to watch, and not just look up to. “Force is always necessary,” Teth-Adam insists, and it’s refreshing that “Black Adam” doesn’t talk him down from that. But risk is always necessary, too; for heroes, yes, but even more so for anyone who’s supposedly willing to be something more complicated than that.
Alonso Duralde, The Wrap
The ensemble does what it can with the material, but no one’s going to be including this in their eventual life-achievement reels. There’s a jarring sense of four-quadrant casting at work here — Brosnan for the parents! Centineo for the teens! Skateboard kid for the tweens! — that reads too obviously as a marketing strategy and not as a cast of characters who would actually be interacting in these circumstances. Most disappointing of all, “Black Adam” is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene. (And there are so, so many fight scenes.) The premise of a superhero whose idea of conflict is to throw his opponents as far as he can offers some subversive chuckles the first two or three times, but it gets old quickly, as does pretty much everything “Black Adam” tosses at its audience. Sometimes, maybe, no plan is better than a bad one.
What Black Adam's Early Reviews Mean For The Film
One of the common threads in the earlier reviews is how Black Adam isn't necessarily a massive course correction for the DCEU, which has been going through its challenges since Joss Whedon's Justice League cut in 2017. It can be unreasonable to expect a character that many mainstream audiences don't know to help somehow steer the ship in the right direction for Warner Bros.'s DCEU properties. Johnson's film is ultimately about his antihero getting a foundation that can lead to larger adventures, including Black Adam fighting Superman.
While critics may be mixed on Black Adam thus far, time will tell how the film connects with audiences and other reviewers that didn't get to see the movie in advance. All the aspects that critics didn't respond well to could be something the audience has a different reaction to when they see Black Adam. Aside from Black Adam's overall reception, it will also come down to its box office result that will decide whether or not Johnson's franchise will continue forward, including the spinoff projects te has in mind. However, It seems that Warner Bros. already has a good working relationship with Johnson, especially as he managed to convince the new heads of WB Pictures for the major surprise cameo, which could indicate his time in the DCEU is far from over after Black Adam.
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