I don't understand why I do this to myself. Every time I watch a DC Extended Universe film, I come away mostly asking myself "why did I do this?" There are some okay ones in there, I suppose, but it sure seems like a lot of misses. I still think Batman v Superman might be my single least favorite film. Wonder Woman 84 and the first attempt at Suicide Squad are way down there, though! This film doesn't quite join them at the VERY bottom of the scale, but it isn't good.
I'll start with the nice: if you love CGI Special Effects, this is a pretty decent place to see them. There are a lot of them, and they actually look pretty cool sometimes. I don't really like the superhero CGI eyeblast style, but I can imagine that some people do like it, and if so I think they'll really enjoy that part of this movie, probably. And Pierce Brosnan does his best.
Well, that's it, that's the nice part. There are so many problems with the movie, but the main ones in my mind are as follows. First, it suffers from DC's standard total inability to figure out what tone it wants. It sets itself up as being very Grim and Serious and Dark, but constantly throws out little one-liner jokes at random. It is very strange to have someone stare Grimly at you and tell a joke, but seem to not even expect you to laugh, because that is too unmanly. It feels a lot like your boss insisting that they are fun and cool, and expecting you to agree.
Second, it clearly doesn't know how to introduce its material; it depends a lot on comic book knowledge, and to make up for that it starts with practically 10 full minutes of "backstory narration" - literally just someone talking about macguffins and wizard shit - instead of showing you anything. Because it can't show you! There's too much. It introduces a team of superheroes, and just has to pretend these are beloved, well-established characters like the Infinity War era Avengers, even though they're all new to movie watchers and no one has any reason to care about them.
Third, and possibly the biggest problem for me personally, is that the movie just doesn't know what it wants to say. It keeps bringing up moral quandaries and then definitively having no clue how to answer them. It vaguely discusses the ideas of self-governance vs authoritarianism, and colonial rule vs freedom, and "ends justify the means" moralism vs "within the system" legal moralism, and a bunch of other things it can't seem to really untangle like the role of America as world police. For example, it takes a random shot at pointing out that America (sorry, "the Justice Society," which is definitely not just America in this metaphor) didn't care about years of rule by mercenary groups and paramilitary organizations, but does care when the oil is threatened (whoops, sorry, when Black Adam shows up). But then it fails to interrogate the idea and just gives up and is like "yeah actually they're doing fine because they're the good guys." What??
I could list examples like this endlessly; it just aggressively refuses to answer any of the questions it seems to want you to think about. Is it good to murder the oppressors? Yes? No? The movie doesn't know. It's just asking questions. What does it mean to be a "hero?" The movie doesn't know. Or care! And it's fine to ask unanswerable questions, I suppose, but some of these questions DO have answers in the real world. And it almost explicitly wants you to NOT think about them too hard, and think about how cool Superman instead. I can't really forgive it for bringing all these ideas about the colonist-colonized relationship, global foreign policy concerns, the value and significance of a cultural identity, etc, all in Fake Afghanistan, and then just declining to actually provide any consideration of them.
Score: 3/10
IMDb: Black Adam
PS: I used to think Man of Steel was really bad, but in the time since its release, the DCEU has shown me that it is actually very average for their films, and something to strive for. On a heavily curved "DC superhero movie" scale I think it's up to about 5/10! Gets better every year!
PPS: Villain dude has the least effective "Legions of Hell" I have ever seen. Imagine summoning forth the forces of darkness and having them lose single combat to "random woman with a pipe" and "kid with a skateboard" and "comic relief lazy fat dude." Also, I can't believe they have like 5 or 6 major superheroes and 2 of them are powered by up the word Shazam at this point.
