‘Black Adam’ Review: Dwayne Johnson Plays an All-Powerful DC Villain Who Can Be Talked Into Heroism
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers for “Black Adam.” It’s kind of a cheat, casting someone as massive as Dwayne Johnson to play a DC superhero — or antihero, in the case of “Black Adam,” an action-packed, adolescent-skewing standalone that presents the swole Samoan star as a nearly invincible global threat. Black Adam is basically an A-bomb in human form, whose emergence from a 5,000-year lockdown calls for emergency intervention by the Justice Society of America, or “JSA,” which dispatches four glorified bench-warmers to contain the situation: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge, gruff), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo, doofy), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell, colorful) and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan, the standout, even if his character reads like a second-rate Doctor Strange).