Adventure Time: STRANGE WORLD

Strange World is Disney Animation once again returning to its least frequent mode: the cheery, red-blooded adventure film. We might get notes of that threaded through their usual animal antics or fairy tale musicals, but when they decide to go all out—the Atlantis: The Lost Empires, the Treasure Planets—the results can be quite entertaining. In the case of Strange World, we’re introduced to a family of explorers whose patriarch (Dennis Quaid) never returns from an attempt to cross the seemingly insurmountable mountain range that surrounds their expansive home valley. This leaves his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) to become a farmer instead. This is an imagined old world where electricity is grown on the vine, and thus allows an agrarian society to have sparkly sci-fi vehicles and gadgets run off of freshly harvested glowing orbs. Farming may not be as exciting as exploring, but it’s perhaps more important. Decades pass, and this farmer, who now has a son of his own (Jaboukie Young-White), is recruited to join an expedition. The crops are dying of a mysterious disease and a group is off in a hovering aircraft—that and the environmentalist bent make for a clear Miyazaki nod—to track down the source. And so off they go, reviving the old family tradition. The movie is told with a similar pluck, traipsing from one appealing cliffhanger to the next in true serial fashion, complete with a soaring heroic orchestra theme and a band of appealing characters.

There’s a Boy’s Adventure magazine aesthetic to the plot’s development, shot through with a refreshingly casual 21st-century diversity—there are men and women, with figures of every color and a couple orientations and it’s no big deal, which is, of course, the big deal. And the world the team discovers, deep in the roots of their prized crop, is a feast of vibrant colors and fluffy surfaces. They find towering Seussian trees and curling DayGlo cliffs, fields of koosh-ball tentacles and grasses, flocks of floating fish and herds of rolling blobs. There’s even a cute blue gummy glob that splats around with chipper personality and becomes the obvious critter sidekick. And guess who else has been trapped down there? In this swirling mystery world of topsy-turvy dangers, there is, of course, room for intergenerational caring and conflict as three generations of guys—a tough grandpa, a stubborn son, and a sensitive grandson—have to learn to work together and truly discover a new way to survive. (Having a great mom (Gabrielle Union) involved helps, too.) Writer-directors Don Hall and Qui Nguyen (Raya and the Last Dragon) weave this family story through the adventure quite naturally, in a charmingly busy picture of constant color and movement. By the end, it’s also brought into focus a parable of ecological collapse and a need to reform an economy around alternatives to destructive industries. All this and a breezy fantasy adventure with eye-pleasing visuals and the earnest ode to family togetherness? Why, that’s just about all you’d want from a satisfying family movie night.

Out of Service: THE MENU and TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

In this new Gilded Age, the rich are a fat, juicy target for any satirist. But in fact, the obscenely wealthy hoovering up our resources and headlines are often far more ridiculous than any satirist could invent. It doesn’t take a political cartoonist to balloon their buffoonery; they’re already doing that on their own. Still, it leaves plenty of room for an astute storyteller to put them before us anew and bite with sharp portraiture to draw bitter laughs. That’s the project of The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, two complementary, and similarly half-successful, movies that take service industry jobs as their window into the one-percenters’ transactional heartlessness that’s at the core of so many societal ills. The willingness to diminish a person to their job is a hop, skip, and a jump from not seeing their humanity at all.

Revenge is the dish served in The Menu, in which a high-level chef (Ralph Fiennes) has invited a collection of horrible people to dinner. Each course ramps up the tension as his cultish cooks and servers twist the knife—sometimes literally—by slowly revealing that 1.) the guests are trapped in the restaurant, and 2.) each tiny, artsy, deconstructed course is designed to steadily reveal ever more of their personal foibles and secrets. There’s a smorgasbord of character actors (Janet McTeer! John Leguizamo! Reed Birney! Judith Light! Nicholas Hoult! And more!) for the ensemble as crooked tech bros, apathetic blue bloods, a snooty food critic and her editor, a washed up actor and his embezzling assistant, and a misogynistic foodie realize they’re being led to a slaughter. The one innocent (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a hired date of one of the diners. So at least there’s one person for whom to wish survival. The characters are all thinly sketched, leaning on our prejudices for implied critiques, and that puts a cap on the sick pleasures it could offer.

There’s a lack of specificity in its energy, and its understandings of its characters. It’s like they know they’re posing for a fiction. The chef himself is an unfair Gordon Ramsey riff, what with his employees shouting “Yes, chef!” upon every command as they run around a kitchen and dining area that looks like a cross between Hell’s Kitchen and Masterchef sets. But it’s never clear what his grievance is, other than, as he says late in the picture, that his guests are the kind of people ruining the art of food. The result is a satire that’s pretty clever line to line—one of the screenwriters comes from the world of Late Night talk shows—and works well enough scene by scene. But it doesn’t really add up to much, with a visual style and pace that’s as smoothly stereotypical as its characters. The movie’s ultimately too pleased with its glibness to dig in and mean something of any consequence. I’ve seen lesser Saw sequels with a better sense of social commentary. Shame this one’s so undercooked.

Triangle of Sadness gets off to a better start because writer-director Ruben Östlund knows how to spin up types and let them crackle with specificities. That’s what makes his best film, Force Majeure, so bleakly funny with its story of a vacationing family’s tensions after a mishap at a ski resort reveals way more about deep character flaws than anyone could’ve anticipated. His The Square does a similar thing with incidents set in a hollowed-out, corporatized, faux-transgressive art world. Sadness has a male model (Harris Dickinson) and his influencer girlfriend (Charlbi Dean) bickering over money before they arrive at a luxury yacht. The middle portion of the movie is dedicated to sharply needling vignettes in which they, or the other insanely privileged, preposterously selfish guests aboard the cruise, are blind to the needs of workers around them. Meanwhile, the smarmy customer service mangers wrangle and cajole their underlings to plaster on those fake smiles and never say “no.” All of these scenes are as precisely observed as they are darkly amusing. By the time Woody Harrelson exits his cabin as the alcoholic leftist captain, the movie’s setting up some pretty obvious ideological collisions, especially as he starts trading Communist critiques with a crooked Russian capitalist’s Thatcherite babbling.

There’s always a sleek intentionality to Östlund’s images, and a stately chill that lets the squirming satire scrambling within them twist all the more uncomfortably. That works right up until it doesn’t in this case. The movie builds up a healthy head of steam on its outrage over inequality. That bursts on a turbulent night that sends these rich folk tumbling through vomit and sewage. That’s a pretty hilarious as a fit of scatological schadenfreude. But it’s the film’s endless final third that slowly unravels anything potent about the early going. Set post-shipwreck on a small tropical island, it thins out its class critiques with a reductive tromping through human nature as a struggle to survive. This doesn’t level the playing field, but reverses it in a reductive, and vaguely condescending way. The result is basically a less astute Lord of the Flies with assholes. And then it concludes—or really just peters out—with a limp joke and some inscrutable ambiguity. That’s the sort of ending that not only is unsatisfying in the moment, but retroactively makes the early going feel weaker, too. It misses the mark.

No One Will Guide You: ARMAGEDDON TIME

What’s ending in James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a boy’s ignorance of life’s complicated problems. Everything else—the injustice, the inequality, trickle-down Reaganism, and, above all, the wisdom to see through it—feels nearer a beginning than an end. At least it is in the fleeting ephemeral time of one mortal life. The movie is set in New York City in 1980. The late 70’s malaise sits heavily on the proceedings, like a fog that’ll only superficially lift before returning all the worse. Within it, a sweet, artistic boy is about to be caught up in a moment that’ll make him aware of the rotten, unfair systems that surround him. Less a coming-of-age story than a becoming-aware story, the boy gradually gets some glimmer of a world swamped with prejudices, and narrated by elites’ inflated sense of self-worth. One has to play the game to get ahead, his mostly well-meaning family insists. His mother (Anne Hathaway) wants to run for school board, and his father (Jeremy Strong) makes a decent living as a plumber. They want their son to have more. It’s up to his warm grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) to encourage his arts and projects, and to give him the twinkly-eyed—and sometimes contradictory—straight talk that he needs to hear. Stand up for yourself, he says. Do the right thing. Fit in when you can, but stand up when you must. Resist the prevailing cultural pressures to see wealth as power, education as utilitarian, art as a hobby, and difference as deficit. What luck this kid has such a mensch in his life. And yet, there’s always more to learn.

Here’s a movie, beguilingly low-key and yet persuasively heavy, about the ways in which a younger person discovers the world around them. It sees the innocence of a child slowly fade in the face of that dawning realization that everyone around them—parents, teachers, politicians—are just as fallible and complicated as anyone. We’re all just getting by. It’s not just a matter of figuring out how to live one’s own life, becoming one’s own person, stepping out from the comfort of a cozy familial unit to find one’s own taste in art, in music, in philosophy. It’s about testing out definitions, and becoming aware society is already drawing boundaries around one’s potential. The boy is privileged, in some ways, to cross class boundaries. His comfortable middle-class Jewish family wants to send him to a private school where he can be away from “bad influences.” Sure, they mean large class sizes, a disinterested teacher, and the pernicious potential of drugs. But also mean Black kids. And they want to give the boy a foothold in a ladder of success by getting in good with the upper-class. They disagree with Reagan—“morons from coast to coast,” the dad will quip about the Gipper’s voters—but are somehow products of his disingenuous bootstrapping spirit nonetheless. The rich WASPy folk they end up fleetingly crossing paths with are even worse in that regard (and their identities are stranger than fiction).

Gray, always a precise, classically restrained filmmaker, understands the importance of detail in making a period piece. His films, like Ellis island melodrama The Immigrant, explorers’ epic The Lost City of Z, and 70s cops-and-robbers picture We Own the Night, are rich in evocative character moments nestled in expertly-chosen mise-en-scène. He knows the irreducible complexity of a historical moment can only be glimpsed through its accumulated details, from the ways people speak, to the facets of culture around them, to the furniture and lamps and technology and clothes and toys in every corner. Armageddon Time's particular historical moment is one he’s very familiar with, as it’s a semi-autobiographical story of his own family and friends at this time. Watching it feels like walking into a memory. It has that frisson of reality, and the crystallization of small noticing, that characterizes great short stories or photographs, drawing the mind’s eye with gestures and design that are poignant, and evocative. There are whole lives lived here, and we’re lucky to glimpse them for a little while. We see a flurry of changes taking place slowly, and all at once, over family dinners and school events, as well as milestones and mistakes. This film is shot in warm, intimate shadows and chilly, autumnal public spaces, balancing the comforts of family with harsher realities slipping into the boy’s awareness. In both settings, there are often subtle shots and blocking that leave space in the frame, offering plenty of room for those dawning implications.

Here, with every detail so well-chosen, and the characters so precisely drawn, the downward pressure of the unspoken grows all the stronger. In this case, there’s added weight to the small, closely-observed story of this boy in the largely untold story of a friend he makes. This other kid, an orphaned Black boy living with his dementia-addled grandmother, is glimpsed mainly at school, and then later in quick moments in shadow or through chain-link fences. Their paths cross meaningfully, but only for a brief time. The lead boy doesn’t entirely understand the full ramifications of the friend’s troubles, or how an attempt to help will inevitably make things worse. An adult audience in 2022 can understand. We can feel the extra sadness around the edges, and fill in the negative space left just off stage, the ballast from an entire, sadder other story largely unseen. In drawing one boy’s life so sensitively and fully, watching the dawning awareness of implications beyond him, it remains frustrating and moving how the boy’s vision—and those influences around him—still can extend only so far. The story builds, not to some grand revelation, but a quiet, subtle shift in understanding. In its particulars—granular, nuanced, specific—it finds something small and sad and true.

Life Finds a Way: BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

I don’t envy the cast and crew of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's task in creating a sequel after its star unexpectedly passed away. Imagine being obligated to make a blockbuster feature film for the most popular ongoing franchise for the biggest studio, but it has to be about the sudden death of your friend and co-worker. That writer-director Ryan Coogler and his collaborators manage to make a movie that’s simultaneously enormous spectacle and gently grief-stricken is some kind of miracle. It has such incredible liftoff that it manages to avoid the downward drag of Marvel formula for more of its runtime than you’d expect. Wakanda Forever is a superhero movie. Technically. But it’s not really interested in building huge CG slugfests, and, indeed, is at its worst when it has to fill half of its climactic confrontation with hectic effects shots of big armies blandly hurtling at each other. What does work is its mournful qualities, which extend not only to its characters mourning the death of Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, but to its exploration of the legacies left by tragedies—familial, royal, colonial. It opens with a funeral, and throughout finds tenderness in scenes with Queen Angela Bassett and Princess Letitia Wright. Starting with such somber celebration—a franchise sendoff that would be crass if it didn’t stay just on the right side of an honest salute—it keeps a fragility throughout.

This sequel finds the fictional African nation tossed into uncertainty as Western nations seek to exploit its resources. Meanwhile, Wakandans are also confronted with another secret nation—an underwater kingdom populated by mutant descendants of a lost Mayan tribe. And so the encroaching conflict is about indigenous survival in the face of genocidal oppression, and the ways in which the pressures of potential colonization turn tribes against each other. Coogler takes the time to build the antagonistic king of the underwater people, Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), into a richer character than we usually see in the more formulaic of these pictures. With evocative backstory filled in quickly, in generously evocative historical flashbacks during a sensitive monologue, we see the pain of Namor’s past sits close to the surface. And the angling between Namor and the Wakandans takes on some complicated real-world edge as characters on all sides consider taking violent steps to protect their own, even at the cost of others. Pity that their conflict has to run through some scenes with Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus back in the States, especially since they tease a promising geopolitical wrinkle that’s summarily dropped. Besides, it’s underwater and in Africa that the movie is most alive.

We get a sense of history in the ways the characters speak to each other, in their gestures and intentions, and as the frames push out into small, suggestive, murky glimpses of a fantastical setting. Coogler keeps his camera close to the characters, but pulls back just enough to give a sampling of worlds populated by unique peoples and cultures their rulers want to protect. The plot globe-hops in a way that feels expansive, and the stakes feel genuinely large. Turns out when you build conflict rooted in character and expressed through their emotional deliberations and deep lineages, you can suggest world-changing suspense without shooting a blue laser into the sky or summoning swarms of aliens or robots to punch for an hour at a time. The result is a comic book plot—complete with side-quests and living MacGuffins—that’s often warmly characterized. Wright, in contrast to the eager comic relief she played last time, is sunken with grief, and sees opportunity for connection with new characters before growing tempted by sorrowful vengeance. Bassett is strong regal suffering—a speech culminating in “Have I not given EVERYTHING!?” is a powerful expression of emotional pains. Returning supporting characters (Lupita N’yongo, Winston Duke, Danai Gurira) have slightly less to do, and I wish there was more attention paid to their moral dilemmas, but their presence is a warm reminder of what the first film did so well: building a community of characters whose words and deeds have consequences, and who relate to each other in ways that have actual weight.

Coogler, unlike most directors working for Marvel, has ideas and knows how to communicate them. His work—a day-in-the-life of a man murdered by police, Fruitvale Station; a celebration of an old franchise by reframing its perspective, Creed; and the original Black Panther—has consistently considered questions of what one can build for oneself while alive, and what one leaves behind for others once gone. He’s suited to make a film about an absence, about characters struggling to live up to a good example that’s been taking from them too soon. But this is also a movie that complicates this easy sadness. It’s earnestly committed to questioning violence and lamenting cycles of retribution. It comes by this honestly, engaged with issues of vengeance and victimhood, expectation and exploitation. Namor is never entirely in the wrong; Wakandans are never entirely right. This makes for good drama, with our heroes wrestling with a sense of morality, weighing what’s satisfying in the moment against what might be better long term. In the movie’s most exciting moments, the spectacle—a fun car chase with an instantly-compelling new character, a concussive water-bombing of Wakanda—runs hand-in-hand with a thrilling sense of wondering how these peoples can find a way to deescalate.

By the end, though, the movie has lost some track of these ideas, burying them in so much zapping and stabbing and chaos that’s atypically, for Coogler, and typically, for Marvel, unreflected upon. I found myself puzzling back through the chain of events and lamenting the shortcuts and sanding-down that had to happen to force a more typically Marvel climactic collision. Here’s a movie that pretty persuasively makes its own case against the formulaic stuff that’s weighing it down. It’s difficult to care about armies colliding, let alone the teases for future conflict, when the movie itself has made it clear it is about, and builds towards more characters realizing, that war does not make one great. Coogler has made an open-hearted franchise picture that’s often genuinely funereal and always interested in rebuilding its heroes’ broken hearts by helping them find new purpose. For the first couple hours, it’s alive and engaged and animated by interesting ideas beneath the fast vehicles, big explosions, and sparingly deployed quips. And in its final moments, it returns to a soft, quiet, tender spirit. That’s the stuff that will linger long after the noisy, simple, limp action of the finale fades.

Improper Conduct: TÁR

Lydia Tár is a brilliant conductor. She can read all the nuance embedded in a sheet of music, feel deeply the gestures and textures of a composer’s choices, and expertly sculpt an orchestra into ecstatic musicality. To listen to a great piece of music with her, or to sit at a piano and see her pull beautiful notes out of the air, you can see her lose herself in its power. She’s also willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the great composers of the past, to see their intent and try to realize it ever better for contemporary audiences. How interesting, then, that she’s so quick to ignore the nuance, the gestures, the textures, of the people in her life. And as for the benefit of the doubt, well, that she only reliably extends to herself. Todd Field’s Tár is a fascinating character study of this fictional woman, and an ice-cold dissection of this peculiar trait of some powerful artists: an ability to bring so much empathy and emotionality into their work that they have little left over for anyone else.

Cate Blanchett plays Tár with imperious confidence in her job. As she rules over the Berlin Philharmonic with an iron grip, we see how, with a wave of her hand, the orchestra blasts bombastic power to the rafters or, in a quick flick of the wrist, falls dead silent. She extends this control in backroom negotiations and extemporaneous lectures, too. She stalks the stage of a college classroom, casts sharp eyes on underlings as they swiftly act on her command, and snaps off learned analysis in interviews and lunches with various high-culture interlocutors. But, for an actress so supremely in control, Blanchett is also quite good at showing the seams around the surfaces of this woman’s life, the quiet insecurities, easy entitlement, and fierce temper battling beneath her regal posture. These are imperfections that can lead to an unravelling, a loose end that frays with her sense of self. Tár has, after all, become used to the status—feted and praised until fettered with the very privilege that affords her multiple fancy apartments, private intercontinental flights, and ready access to eager, vulnerable, starstruck people who end up exploited in one way or another for a chance at breaking into a career in the arts. Tár’s sense of privileged and narrow focus leaves her blind to mistakes this hierarchy breeds.

Field, the writer-director behind deeply felt, finely-tuned dramas In the Bedroom and Little Children, here shapes a film that’s imposing and inviting, drawing us into a specific world populated with fascinating figures. It’s simultaneously a relatively straightforward character study and a cold work packed with elusive and mysterious detail, puzzling elisions, and tantalizingly unresolved facets of plot and character. (“Loose ends,” an important one-scene character shrugs toward the end of the nearly three-hour runtime.) Around Tár we find: her wife and daughter, her personal assistant, various orchestra players and staff, potential lovers, rival conductors, fawning fans, retired musicians, and mysterious missives from a troubled former mentee. For each, she’s, almost unconsciously, putting on a show to maintain her prestige, and her relationships, as facets of the self she’s built for display. This potential material for modern melodrama is kept on an ominous low boil under a frosty surface as Field carefully frames his figures in imposing structures—both literal, in Berlin blocks, roomy apartments, and New York streets, and metaphorically, in the levels of bureaucracy and embedded prejudices within this rarified air.

Within these spaces, during these few weeks in the life of its characters as they prepare for a book launch and a recording of a piece by Mahler, is a sharp statement about how complicated life is. Particularly, this complication is rooted in the thorny discussions of what to do about great art made by troubled, or troubling, artists. It does so by not only seeing this conductor in all her potential for destruction in her own life and in the lives of others, but by considering the art world’s culpability in uplifting and maintaining the structures that enable those like her, and those worse than her. And yet, such beautiful, imposing, enveloping music! The movie pointedly passes by every potential off-ramp of easy explanation, simple judgment, or pat conclusions. Fittingly, it has a gray palate—stone and glass—and a spacious soundtrack full of pregnant pauses and unspoken implications between the symphonic movements. And the film moves with metronomic certainty, stepping so surely as it presents a fully-realized character (and, in its most uncomfortable moments, a performance that’s a performance of a performance) in all her successes and talent, and her irreconcilable flaws and foibles. How true. Why, to reflect on the film is to reflect on a character who almost feels like a real person we’ve met.

Star Command: TICKET TO PARADISE

There’s a scene late in Ticket to Paradise when stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney, playing a divorced couple who have heretofore been bickering and bantering, finally stop for a quiet moment together. They’re on the top of a mountain on a tropical island and the sun is low in the sky, casting soft orange light all around them. They speak softly and openly to each other and, as their eyes start to sparkle, for the first time from beneath the needling chemistry that’s been sending sparks, we can see the real glow of affection they still have for each other. As they kindle this reconnection, I found myself thinking: I hope they kiss right now. And if that’s not a sign a romantic comedy has its hooks in you, I don’t know what is. The movie is a welcome example of a mode of moviemaking that’s all-but extinct—the glossy Hollywood rom-com—generously containing a further throwback—the comedy-of-remarriage. It finds in this comforting return to sturdy formula yet more resuscitation: a studio movie driven solely by Movie Star power. Roberts and Clooney, in particular, are at this point underutilized old pros, performers totally at ease with effortless charm. The movies these days afford them too few opportunities to appear at all, let alone uncork the full extent of their appeal. And so here we care about this couple because their actors are so good at embodying even the flimsiest formula with depth of personality, and projecting a charismatic likability in every angle and with each line reading. Because they’re pros, we can feel comfortable they can take this journey to its destination and find enough fun along the way.

Writer-director Ol Parker’s previous film was the fizzy lifting drink of a musical: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. That one, far and away his best work, and as feel-good a movie as any released in the last decade or two, must’ve unlocked something in his filmmaker toolkit. Here he continues capably marshaling the charms of stars swanning about gorgeous island locales enacting slightly silly but earnestly felt family dramas that bubble and sparkle with clever dialogue and float toward some convincing sentiment in the end. Clooney and Roberts reluctantly reunite en route to their daughter’s impromptu destination wedding. She (Kaitlyn Dever) has only known the guy for a few weeks, so the parents plan to talk her out of it. Even with just those two sentences, I’m sure you can start to piece together the plot. Yes, it has the miscommunications and mishaps and mistakes and moments of genuine connection and affection. But the joy isn’t in the story per se, thought it is sturdy, but its telling. The proceedings are kept agreeably light and amusing, photographed with brightly-lit scenic views, and build to those moments where, yes, you really do want to see the couple get together in the end. Paradise? Perhaps not exactly, but, when all the stars align, it’s in the neighborhood.

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.