Anti-Hero: BLACK ADAM

Here we are again. Black Adam is another walloping might-makes-right superhero power fantasy. It mistakes noise and movement and non-stop violence for excitement, and assumes loud frantic explanations can pass for story. It has some good visual designs and an atypical setting that engages some novel ideas, but it’s also cloaked in a dour, murderous tone and a pace that’s so quickly cut there’s no room to catch a breath. Yet I’ve also come to appreciate the DC movies for their willingness to go overboard, for their sense of careening out of control with more characters and world-shaking developments than one cluttered feature film could contain. That seems to suit the mythological dimensions of even the lesser efforts in this particular cinematic universe. Unlike Marvel’s tidy decades-long planning and homogenous style, DC has been more often than not a chaos of outsized comic book visuals and nonsense plotting that’s concurrently too thin and overstuffed. This one locates a potentially provocative story of exploitation and imperialism—and the need for the enslaved to rise up and take over their own destinies—and buries it in a hurry-scurry plot that gets nowhere fast amidst breathless exposition and cheesecloth characterizations. It’s unsatisfying in its miss, but not in its swing.

After an endless prologue, it introduces a Justice Society (not to be confused with the Justice League) that apparently works with the Suicide Squad’s leader (Viola Davis) to tackle superpowered problems. In this case: Black Adam. He’s an ancient protector of the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom Kahndaq. He was a slave granted god-like powers by the same wizard (Djimon Hounsou) who gave the kid in Shazam his boost. Adam was asleep for thousands of years. Now awoken in modern day by a freedom-fighting professor (Sarah Shahi), he mostly just wants to bring death and destruction to the imperialist gang that rules what was once his city. They fly around on their sci-fi jet bikes and amass an entirely undifferentiated and vaguely defined army. Adam, played by Dwayne Johnson with a stony edifice and rumbling monosyllabic pomposity, floats like an indestructible block through these armies of Bad Guys, exploding them in surprisingly intense ways given the ostensible bounds of the PG-13. He loves killing those who get in his way. But instead of a simple fight for his country’s freedom, the conflict for most of the movie is that the team of shiny heroes sent in to get him under control would rather he not indiscriminately murder people with his lightning hands and speed and strength and flight. Sure, the enemies are bad, the likes of Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) tell him. But that doesn’t mean you can just blow them apart.

So Black Adam fights these and other heroes—invincible action figures who slam power into power over and over beyond all reason—until they agree that they instead need to agree to disagree and stop the real bad guys together. The villain who basically sits out the first chunk of the movie suddenly, and literally, turns into a demon from hell, complete with devil horns and a pentagram on his puffed-up CG chest, inaugurating a whole new round of super-punching. It’s all a deadening too-muchness of a repetitive spectacle. The performers are game, and director Jaume Collet-Serra (the B-movie expert in his recent, less effective, A-budget phase) manages to whip up some appealing bombast here and there amidst the otherwise fuzzy, muddy visuals. (I especially liked the fractal planes through which Brosnan travels.) But the swirling frenzy deadens and dominates more than it entertains. I could imagine a version of the movie where it had a slightly sharper take on its politics. Coding the Justice Society as clueless American interventionists is already a step in a clever direction. Explaining their existence even a little bit might’ve been nice. The movie would still need a better shape to its story, though. There’s so much repetition of plot and action beats that one wonder why they wasted their time doing it all so quickly the first time. It may have suitably outsized potential—and a huge, booming orchestral main theme that promises a grander adventure than we get—but it’s just a bludgeoning experience to which you either begrudgingly surrender or give up on entirely.

Gaslighter: THE INVISIBLE MAN

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man knows a monster movie is only as good as its metaphor. Thus it spins a gripping, upsetting, and satisfying chiller out of a great one. It starts with a woman (Elisabeth Moss) escaping an abusive relationship, her controlling boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) so outraged at that prospect that, when he awakes to find her sneaking away in the middle of the night, he runs at the car and punches its window out. She just barely flees, and as she tries to recover a life for herself with the help of her sister (Harriet Dyer) and a friend (Aldis Hodge), she feels haunted by her poisonous relationship. The key to the film’s working so well is its grounding the psychology of these opening scenes. Selling the realism of the moment is a raw and open performance from Moss (drawing on her Mad Men poise and Handmaid's Tale despair) and tenterhooks prickling filmmaking from Whannell (veteran genre craftsman most recently of the gory good sci-fi actioner Upgrade). There's a deliberate pace, ice-cold cinematography often isolating her in the frame, amped-up sound design making every sudden noise a potential threat. It puts the audience in her headspace. This isn’t merely a pulp start; an entirely convincing realistic drama might be spun from these truthful, observant scenes of a woman readjusting after living under the thumb of a cruel, manipulative partner. The acting is rooted in precisely calibrated real-world horror. Her partner was already a monster before he’s even more of a monster. 

That the movie uses this sturdy, steady foundation for its central metaphor makes everything that follows all the more effective and suspenseful. A couple weeks after her escape, she hears that he’s killed himself. This should make her feel safer. At least, that’s what her support system tries to tell her. But she can’t shake the feeling that her abuser is around — a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck sense that someone is watching. When it escalates to objects in the background suddenly moving — a gleaming knife slipping off that counter; a disembodied puff of breath on a cold porch — and then props in the foreground behaving strangely — an open door, a yanked sheet — it’s clear there’s something going on. And it’s even clearer that every little ghost-story style poltergeist activity is calibrated to make her appear crazy, to sow doubt in her support system, to isolate her and maintain her invisible abuser’s manipulative control over her life. It’s a haunting metaphor, and the undetectable, unpredictable effects of its monster’s actions make for truly unsettling negative space, and the most jolting of jump scares. As the movie springs its surprises, explaining its conceit, revealing new layers of horror, and paying off elements you won’t even realize were setups in the first place, Whannell takes great pleasure in playing the audience, twisting the knife with sudden shocks while dangling the possibility for catharsis. It’s an exceptionally well-crafted feat of genre fare, brilliantly reconfiguring H.G. Wells’ original idea via the recently buzzworded classic film Gaslight into a freshly creepy bit of horror filmmaking. It’s hugely entertaining with its chilly tension impressively sustained, while at its center is the painful story of a woman whose inside-out understanding of her ex’s evil is dangerously disbelieved.

West Coast Story: STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

It never fails to amaze me how all musicians’ biopics eventually turn into the same movie. Once they get past the specifics of where and when their particular stars burst into success, and the exciting early flashes of creativity and fame, it’s always contract disputes, fights over attribution and compensation, battles with drugs and/or disease, struggles with jealousies and egos, and finally a reckoning with past mistakes that somehow cements the subjects’ place in pop culture history. It’s one of the movies' most predictable formulas, a cross-promotional opportunity in the form of music business mythologizing. That a wide swath of industry legends, varied in time, place, genre, and character, can be reduced and inflated to weirdly similar tropes is more than a bit tiresome. And yet, the form holds steady and even occasionally jolts to life because 1.) when it works it works, and 2.) it’s so often true.

Take Straight Outta Compton for example, an up-tempo and glossy reenactment of the rise of gangsta rap on the West Coast in the late-80s and early-90s. It blasts to life with capable and exciting rising action, charting the success and decline of the groundbreaking hip-hop group N.W.A. with energy. The guys in the group came of age in Compton neighborhoods rife with poverty, feuding gangs, and constant police brutality. They turned the frustrations and pleasures of their daily lives into raunchy rhymes set to catchy beats, telling the truth of their experience in a way that spoke to others like them, and to a mainstream eager to eat up that authenticity. It’s a common trope for movies like this to say that the music in question was unlike anything heard before. But here we not only see how tremendously exciting N.W.A.’s music was, we get a sense of the times to which it was perfectly positioned to speak.

The screenplay (by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, with story credits for S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus) starts strong, digging into the group’s origin story. We first meet the ambitious young men, Ice Cube (played by his son, O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and The D.O.C. (Marlon Yates Jr.), in confrontations with cops who roll up threateningly. In our current climate of police brutality and racist practices, scenes of beatings, intimidations, and incarcerations are all the more electric. The movie opens on a raid, a militarized vehicle blasting open a drug house, the battering ram slamming into one of the occupants as Eazy-E, a low-level dealer, flees. Later, we see Cube, a sensitive poet, menaced by police, and Dre, an aspiring DJ, locked up for little more than throwing a single punch. Soon, they’re putting their creative energies together to cut a record, turbulent social energies feeding their expression.

These early scenes are the best, painting a vivid portrait of life in Compton as a group of charismatic young people hangs on the precipice of stardom. Soon, they’ve met a sleazy manager (Paul Giamatti) who promises riches. They record an album – 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, featuring hits like the galvanic “Fuck tha Police” – and head out on a whirlwind cross-country tour. Huge crowds flock to their concerts, while their music scares pearl-clutching pundits. It comes to a head in a terrific scene set in Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena where a crowd of white cops backstage warns N.W.A. not to play a certain song. Bet you can guess which one. They perform it, of course, and the crowd erupts. So do the cops.

For a while, director F. Gary Gray puts a little extra energy in this based-on-a-true-story form. Maybe it helps that he would’ve been around for some of it, what with his directorial debut being an Ice Cube video in 1993. He’s best known for low comedy (Friday) and slick thrillers (The Negotiator), and here plays to his strengths. With cinematographer Matthew Libatique, the look is sparkling and smooth. He makes scenes of hotel room parties and backstage antics sing with rambling raunchy camaraderie, while clashes with authority figures have a tense edge. There are plenty of interesting moments, compellingly acted, as the guys struggle to reconcile their individual priorities with the group’s dynamics. Cube goes solo, setting off a volley of diss tracks. Dre meets Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor), who is presented in a largely villainous light as he lures him into a new business partnership.

But in moving from their initial high-flying fame to the daily grind of managing relationships with business, the movie loses energy and novelty. Gray and his collaborators embalm recent history for preservation and praise, but not much in the way of narrative or cultural context. After the group hits big then falls apart, the movie becomes less a story and more a selection of biographical details, a collection of scenes in which characters and songs practically step out and get their own annotated introduction. For instance: “Who’s this guy?” one character will say, pointing at a new face. “That’s Snoop,” comes the answer, as Keith Stanfield steps in to play him for a scene and a half, rapping a few recognizable bars. How often can we watch scenes weighted with hindsight, nudging and winking at us to recognize famous lyrics, names, interviews, and catchphrases (“Bye, Felicia” shows up in an awfully belabored sequence)?

The movie starts strong and loses energy the more it becomes a predictable recitation of familiar biopic beats. Instead of digging into the lives of these men as characters, a rough and energized truth is sanded down to fit a commodified varnished version, comfortable and corporate. (Over the end credits, we practically get an ad for Beats by Dre.) Here’s a movie that lives moment by moment in an energetic novel space – the first sprawling rap history period piece – and adds up to a whole lot of unfocused familiar motions, reducing complicated real people into shiny pop symbols.