Fidelity to basic film storytelling keeps “Black Adam” centered even when it’s doing ten things at once. The film is packed with foreshadowings, setups, payoffs, twists, and surprises, and filled with well-defined lead and supporting characters. One standout is Brosnan, who delivers a moving portrait of an immortal who is tired of seeing the future and thinking back on his past. Dr. Fate looks at those who can live in the present with a mixture of melancholy, wisdom, and envy.
Another is Johnson, who has real acting chops but in recent years has often seemed to be constrained (maybe intimidated?) by his lucrative image as the people’s colossus. He’s as minimalist as one could be when playing a god. He takes a lot of his cues from the screen star that the film quotes most often, Clint Eastwood, but he also seems to have learned from action hero performances by stars like Neeson, Toshiro Mifune, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charles Bronson, who understood that the camera can detect and amplify subtle tremors of emotion as long as you act with the film—not just in it, and never against it. The peak is a fleeting moment when Johnson lets us know that something deep inside Adam has changed by glancing in a different direction and softening his features. It’s maybe half a second. It’s not the kind of acting that wins prizes because if it’s done well—as it is here—you feel as if it happened in your mind rather than on the screen.
The politics and spirituality of the movie are just as committed and consistent. Even when the story flirts with Orientalism or incorporates simplistic Western heaven-and-hell imagery, “Black Adam” never loses track of what Adam represent in our world: autonomy, liberation, the possibility of redemption and renewal, and a refusal to be defined by however things have always been done.
The result sometimes plays like the DC answer to the pop culture-quake that was “Black Panther,” serving up a Middle Eastern-inflected version of the Marvel film’s Afro-Futurist sensibility, and letting its setting stand in for any place that was colonized. But its politics are more clearly defined and less compromised. “Black Adam” is staunchly anti-imperialist to its marrow, even equating the Avengers-like crew sent to capture and imprison Black Adam to a United Nations “intervention” force that the people of the region don’t want because it only makes things worse. The movie is anti-royalist, too, which is even more of a surprise considering that the backstory hinges on kings and lineage.
“Black Adam” is a superlative and clever example of this sort of movie, coloring within the lines while drawing fascinating doodles on the margins. In its brash, relentless, overscaled way, Collet-Serra’s film respects its audience, and wants to be respected by it. “Black Adam” gives the audience everything they wanted, along with things they never expected.
Only in theaters today.
Sumber: www.rogerebert.com
