Black Adam is possibly one of the most generic superhero movies ever made. In a year that also gave us Morbius, that's quite a statement to make, but true. For me, Black Adam sits somewhere between being better than Morbius and Love&Thunder, but far from good.
Like many of the DCEU movies, it doesn't set up the characters properly or give us the core reasons we should care about these characters and what their theme is. The Rock's likability and natural charisma and charm is wasted on such a serious, dour character like Black Adam. You can sense the restraint The Rock is using to make Black Adam more ominous and less relatable than his typical schtick, and it makes the character feel clunky as a result.
Physically, The Rock is perfectly cast and I've said for many years he should play a comic character. He's one of the few major actors that doesn't need to train at all for the role of a superhero and can show up on-set ready to play the part the day-of. But the physical side can only go so far, and there's moments where The Rock tries to batner with some of the side-characters, but still trying to embody the seriousness of Black Adam, and it just comes off as awkward. Overall, this character just doesn't work for him, and a more standard heroic role with more potential for comedy would've been a better fit.
The other heroes introduced, The Justice Society, are for the most part as flat and ineffective as Black Adam himself. It really does seem like Black Adam and the rest of the Justice Society should've been introduced in a previous DCEU project. They have the most ridiculously undercooked plan from a group of superheroes I've seen in a long time, and while the movie tries to hint at self-awareness of this through dialogue, that still doesn't make what they're actually doing with the story good. It really more makes the Justice Society look like clowns. Pierce Brosnan is the best performance in the movie, to nobody's surprise, but even then we get so little of why we should care about the JS and who their characters are. I have to give a mention to Cyclone being arguably the most worthless character in a superhero movie ever. Her tactic against Black Adam, a being as strong as Superman, is to toss pipes at him with the wind, and she contributes more or less nothing the rest of the movie.
The movie tries to sell Black Adam as an anti-hero, and tries to make attempts at a sort of moral grey-area, but it falls flat. Intergang, the force invading Khandaq, is objectively evil without any redeeming reason to be there, so when Black Adam kills them, there's not really a sense of shock or any moral deliberation. They're remorseless scumbags conquering a country for their resources (Eternium, not only seeming like a blatant rip-off of Black Panther regardless of whichever came first in the comics, but also the most poorly named fictional material since Unobtanium in Avatar), so aside from the act of murder itself, which they bring on themselves by attempting to mortally kill Black Adam, there's really not much of a moral quandary here. Nothing Black Adam does in the movie embodies the "anti" part of being an anti-hero. His actions never lead to an innocent person dying or even getting slightly hurt. This is the kind of content missing from something like Black Adam, that could actually drive a sense of consequence and drama, stuff like that is supposed to be the foundation of comic book stories, but they shy away from taking the story there and attempting to tell us who the characters are through goofy dialogue rather than actions.
To contrast with Black Adam, look at another former WWE-star in a DC production: John Cena as Peacemaker from his own show with the same name and '21's The Suicide Squad. Peacemaker actually does hold morally questionable views, is introduced to us as a criminal psychopath, and is blatantly antagonistic to the lead character. In his own show, he grows from these aspects of character and becomes less sociopathic, which is interesting to watch. The main difference there is that The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker had the involvement of James Gunn, who actually knows how to craft oddball characters with a sense of love and a way of making even the weirdest characters endearing.
Black Adam shows that after all this time, even with some successes in recent years, the DCEU still doesn't consistently know how to craft interesting characters that feel at least somewhat fleshed out in an inter-connected universe. Everything about Black Adam feels as if a machine was given all the typical elements of a modern superhero movie and made to produce one, without any of the heart or regard to character, or what makes the genre really work. It's good enough to not be awful, but not good enough to be memorable.
Like many of the DCEU movies, it doesn't set up the characters properly or give us the core reasons we should care about these characters and what their theme is. The Rock's likability and natural charisma and charm is wasted on such a serious, dour character like Black Adam. You can sense the restraint The Rock is using to make Black Adam more ominous and less relatable than his typical schtick, and it makes the character feel clunky as a result.
Physically, The Rock is perfectly cast and I've said for many years he should play a comic character. He's one of the few major actors that doesn't need to train at all for the role of a superhero and can show up on-set ready to play the part the day-of. But the physical side can only go so far, and there's moments where The Rock tries to batner with some of the side-characters, but still trying to embody the seriousness of Black Adam, and it just comes off as awkward. Overall, this character just doesn't work for him, and a more standard heroic role with more potential for comedy would've been a better fit.
The other heroes introduced, The Justice Society, are for the most part as flat and ineffective as Black Adam himself. It really does seem like Black Adam and the rest of the Justice Society should've been introduced in a previous DCEU project. They have the most ridiculously undercooked plan from a group of superheroes I've seen in a long time, and while the movie tries to hint at self-awareness of this through dialogue, that still doesn't make what they're actually doing with the story good. It really more makes the Justice Society look like clowns. Pierce Brosnan is the best performance in the movie, to nobody's surprise, but even then we get so little of why we should care about the JS and who their characters are. I have to give a mention to Cyclone being arguably the most worthless character in a superhero movie ever. Her tactic against Black Adam, a being as strong as Superman, is to toss pipes at him with the wind, and she contributes more or less nothing the rest of the movie.
The movie tries to sell Black Adam as an anti-hero, and tries to make attempts at a sort of moral grey-area, but it falls flat. Intergang, the force invading Khandaq, is objectively evil without any redeeming reason to be there, so when Black Adam kills them, there's not really a sense of shock or any moral deliberation. They're remorseless scumbags conquering a country for their resources (Eternium, not only seeming like a blatant rip-off of Black Panther regardless of whichever came first in the comics, but also the most poorly named fictional material since Unobtanium in Avatar), so aside from the act of murder itself, which they bring on themselves by attempting to mortally kill Black Adam, there's really not much of a moral quandary here. Nothing Black Adam does in the movie embodies the "anti" part of being an anti-hero. His actions never lead to an innocent person dying or even getting slightly hurt. This is the kind of content missing from something like Black Adam, that could actually drive a sense of consequence and drama, stuff like that is supposed to be the foundation of comic book stories, but they shy away from taking the story there and attempting to tell us who the characters are through goofy dialogue rather than actions.
To contrast with Black Adam, look at another former WWE-star in a DC production: John Cena as Peacemaker from his own show with the same name and '21's The Suicide Squad. Peacemaker actually does hold morally questionable views, is introduced to us as a criminal psychopath, and is blatantly antagonistic to the lead character. In his own show, he grows from these aspects of character and becomes less sociopathic, which is interesting to watch. The main difference there is that The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker had the involvement of James Gunn, who actually knows how to craft oddball characters with a sense of love and a way of making even the weirdest characters endearing.
Black Adam shows that after all this time, even with some successes in recent years, the DCEU still doesn't consistently know how to craft interesting characters that feel at least somewhat fleshed out in an inter-connected universe. Everything about Black Adam feels as if a machine was given all the typical elements of a modern superhero movie and made to produce one, without any of the heart or regard to character, or what makes the genre really work. It's good enough to not be awful, but not good enough to be memorable.