 Look out Morbius, Black Adam just hit theaters and he's gunning for your throne. The good news is, if you're not sure if you should see this cinematic masterpiece in theaters, you can wait just a few months and ignore it when it hits HBO Max. You smell what the rock's cooking? It's another bad movie. I wasn't sure which intro to go with so I just used all three. Hi, I'm White Adam and I'm gonna be talking about Black Adam, spoiler-free edition. When I think about Dwayne The Rock Johnson, entrepreneur, massive, Adonis of a man, bad movies. Sometimes mid, sometimes all right, but for the most part, pretty awful. Pairing him with the DCEU? That's a match made in hell right there. Now instantly someone's gonna jump up and say, DCEU hater, you're a Marvel shill or a fanboy. Nah, I don't care about either of them. Marvel's been doing a lot of bad stuff lately. The DCEU is all over the place. I do applaud them for at least attempting to do different types of movies. As opposed to Marvel, that just seems to be making Guardians of the Galaxy but worse every time. But I'm gonna be Billy Crystal Clear with you right now. Black Adam is a bad movie. And not because it's slow movie and or boring, it's actually quite the contrary. There's a lot of action. Tons of action as a matter of fact, but action without substance is just a bad video game cutscene, which most of this movie feels like. Dwayne Johnson, who's typically incredibly charismatic through all that out the window, he's playing a character here. Unfortunately, the character he chose is Brie Larson's Captain Marvel. He doesn't even interest smile. That brow doesn't go up. He is stone faced throughout the entire picture when he's not computer generated, which to be fair, he often is. Black Adam also foregoes any sort of plot structure. The first hour of this movie is just nonstop explosions and action. And none of it's very satisfying. I was nodding off in the theater at the 45 minute mark. I had to like smack my face to stay awake. And there was action everywhere. It just wasn't interesting. Now, at least the location's interesting, right? We're in Egypt for like 90% of this. To break that down further to be more specific, we're on a sound stage with a green screen projecting a small little city in Egypt for 90% of the film. Nothing feels real. Even when people are just walking around in houses, I stop and think like, are they even in a room? Or is that all green screen too? There was a moment about an hour in when I was caught off guard. And that's when Teth Adam, yeah, his name is Teth Adam and that's not Black Adam. That name's never uttered once. He throws one of the soldiers into the grass and the grass actually moved. And I was like, whoa, that's real. They actually had a patch of grass here that they filmed on. That's cool. This was one of many issues Thor Love and Thunder had. Nothing felt real. And I understand it's a little harder in that situation because you're on different planets, traversing the galaxy. But you know what? No, if the Martian starring Matt Damon can convince a bunch of people that they actually filmed the movie on Mars, then these massively budgeted superhero movies should be able to get a cityscape right. So the production's bad. What about the music? Outside of kind of like your generic superhero themes in the background, we have some very ill timed tone deaf music popping in and out. Remember everybody's favorite musician these days? Kanye West, Jewish savior Kanye West. Yeah, they play one of his songs. They play Power for like eight seconds. And not only does it feel out of place in the movie, it just feels out of place in general now. Really bad timing on that one. They also have an early scene that features smashing pumpkins. The world is a vampire. And what's the company in that music? Just a camera shot going through the city. Just a standard camera shot. No action, nothing too exciting. Yeah, that was a nice use of the song. What about the story? There's kind of one. It's a total narrative mess. The thing opens with a really ugly backstory about Tith Adam, narrated by one of the most annoying young actors I've seen in quite some time. I don't know his name. I'm gonna call him Skater Boy because he's always got a skateboard on him. And once in a while he does a trick. He might've even thrown a kick flip out. I'm not sure. There are far too many scenes dedicated to Skater Boy. I don't know if he's from the comics. I don't care. Get him out of the movie. He's out running bad guys by like skateboarding sideways up a wall and going down a secret, homelone style trap door in his house. He's constantly doing this poor man's Wakanda forever symbol trying to rally up the crowd. I hate this kid. He's got good intentions, but I don't like the character. I'm sorry, I just don't. He bothers me. He's annoying. He's annoying with his chipperness. And that's another problem. The stakes are so silly in this movie. No one reacts to things in a plausible way. There'll be these evil zombie creatures walking around and the first time these people see them, they're like, let's go, let's fight them. That's not how people react. You know what's one thing the MCU does really well? It builds the tech and the characters up over a course of a lot of movies. DCE was so insistent on pushing this stuff out so quickly they don't let anything naturally grow or breathe. So now we have a new Justice League. I forgot the name of them. It's like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but not that. Even worse than that somehow, it's got Hawkman. It's got Doctor Strange 2.0. Doctor Fate, I believe, played by Pierce Brosnan, who is actually great in this, but Pierce Brosnan's always great. So that's not really a compliment to the movie. That's just a compliment to the actor. And all this hajj is trying to do a good job as Hawkman. They all are. They're all doing their best. It's just the dialogue and the script is so poorly done. These people are just thrown into the movie like they've existed the entire time in the DCEU. Almost no development to any of them. What is Hawkman? Is he like Falcon from The Winter Soldier? He's got dumb ass wings, but also has a stupid mask with a beak? He looks completely ridiculous in it. What are his powers? Because he fights Black Adam throughout the whole movie. He's kind of the antagonist with them. You know that friendly rivalry? Except for it's not friendly. He legitimately hates him. Black Adam can move as fast as Flash, possibly faster. I don't, it doesn't matter. Fast enough to beat up a Hawk guy. Especially if he doesn't have powers. He's got skin showing. Black Adam can just electrocute him and it's over. But you gotta like throw away the plausibility because it's a comic book movie. But also at the same time, you gotta have a balance, right? It's gotta at least add up a little bit. And I do make fun of that in the MCU as well. It's like at what point is Hawkeye useless in Black Widow? Put him in Iron Man suits at least, right? What good is having perfect aim when you can just lock on without a target? Anyway, I digress. These movies are silly. This director must have came from the same school of art that the director of Morbius did because the slow-mo speed-ups, they're aggressive and they're constant. Think 300, but without the coolness, without the art, without the charm. I don't think there was an action scene where more than 30 seconds go by without a. And I like slow-mo speed-up. I ate it up, but here it was just too much and too stupid. Rounding out task force dipshit. We got a couple teens. We have tornado girl, cyclone or something. It doesn't matter. And then there's Adam Smasher or Smasher for short. Smasher, hardly know her. Subscribe. These two again are doing what they can. Cyclone's my favorite because with her power, she not only makes wind effects that do pretty much nothing ever, but she has to make the most ridiculous dance moves to do them. It's like she's recording a TikTok every time she goes into battle. Huh, wind. Huh, more wind. And this isn't some cool ass airbending like Aang would do, flying on a wind ball, chucking stuff with the staff. No, she's legitimately doing an interpretive dance in the air and gusts and tornadoes are coming out. 70% of this movie exists because of a misunderstanding. I do have to point out my favorite hilarious character development attempt the script tries to do. I'm gonna paraphrase, of course. I don't remember it off the top of my head, but Cyclone and Adam Smasher are sitting together, kind of having this intimate one-on-one conversation that lasts all of 30 seconds because the movie doesn't have time to slow down. We gotta keep blowing stuff up. Anyway, he's like, so how did you get your abilities to do very little and make a spectacle of it? It's actually really awful. When I was 15 years old, a mad scientist operated on me and put nanotechnology inside of my bones so now I can control wind. That's pretty much verbatim. And he looks at her and he's like, oh man, that's rough. That's the scene, that's the whole thing. He's like Jerry Seinfeld, that's a shame. This movie's an embarrassment. And at some point I'd like Dwayne Johnson to just be in something good. For those of you wondering if there's an end credit sequence, there's at least one. I didn't wait for the way end because at that point I was just so exhausted, so mentally drained from whatever was happening on screen. I don't know. It's a good one. I'd wait and watch it on YouTube when it inevitably leaks in a week or so and move on with your life. But DCEU fans will be kind of happy. They'll go, oh yeah, I'm dying inside. There's probably more I could say, but at this point I wanna hear from you. Let me know in the comments if you plan on seeing this film or if you already did and what you thought about it. Like the video if you had some fun. Feel free to subscribe if you haven't. I post tons of movie and TV show related content each and every week. We'd love to have you stick around. And if you for some reason forgot my name and the name of my channel, well I'll tell you it right now. It's... Movie references, right? Thanks for sticking around. Since you're still here, maybe you wanna join me on Patreon at patreon.com slash adamdoesmovies. This is a one man operation. I put in a lot of work. I have a full time job. I got a wife and kids. I got mouths to feed. So I'd love a little bit of help for me if you're a fan. There's a $1 tier, a $5. It goes all the way up to 30. And at that level, you can actually choose a movie for me to review every month. Sometimes it's torturous. 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