Black Adam Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

Downs...

5. It's An INSANELY Generic Superhero Movie

The trailers seemed to suggest that Black Adam was about as generic and flavourless as modern superhero movies come, and that's sadly confirmed to be the case in the end product.

From first minute to last, this feels like it fell straight out of the year 2000: a by-the-numbers action-adventure movie cross-bred with an unambitious comic book film.

Every single narrative beat of Adam's anti-heroic journey can be seen coming a mile off, and it's painfully obvious that the filmmakers have drawn from the MCU's template in the quest to deliver a broadly entertaining yet unchallenging piece of work.

Hell, many of the focal heroes even feel like ersatz facsimiles of MCU superstars - Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan) is jarringly similar to Doctor Strange, Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) is akin to Ant-Man, and even Adam himself has shades of Drax the Destroyer with his hyper-literal mindset.

Beyond that, it sprints through a checklist of superhero movie tropes like its life depends on it: of course there's briefly a beam in the sky during the movie's finale, and the way it cuts to the end credits is so predictable as to rouse laughter.

There are certainly worse things for a movie to be than generic, but after waiting so long for Johnson's passion project to hit the screen, you can't really be blamed for wanting more.