Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam is an appalling fiasco, easily one of the worst, most ill-conceived movies of 2022. Like the lightning bolt that adorns the titular character’s unitard, it points straight down — down to the bottom of the year’s most painful time-wasters, among bad company like Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore and Uncharted.
If the notoriously shelved Batgirl movie was worse than this, it must have been a truly historic boondoggle. I don’t think it takes too much imagination to suspect that Batgirl was merely mediocre, but Black Adam was too expensive — and too beholden to its star The Rock — to let lie. If Black Adam was deemed suitable for release, any garbage is worthy of a tile on the HBO Max app.
There can’t be many comic book villains that are genuine household names, familiar outside of fandom circles. Maybe Lex Luthor and perhaps Dr. Doom, the latter by sight if not by name? I myself have read a lot of comics, but had never heard of Black Adam. So, consulting Wikipedia for help in understanding this nonsense, I was surprised to learn it’s a supporting character from the 1940s Captain Marvel comics (a property now known as Shazam, thanks to obvious legal snafus), and only intermittently employed since. The film opens with seven full minutes of narration to explain this tediously backstory, which is somehow simultaneously complex and childishly simplistic. Seven minutes! I counted!
The choice to create an entire mass-market movie around a deep-cut comic book character doesn’t strike me as good business sense. It barely alludes to the ostensibly related Shazam movie, and relegates more familiar superfriends like Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) and Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) to supporting roles. Utterly mystifying.
Marvel has had this formula figured out for years: first, gain a foothold with well-known goodies like Spider-Man, before giving starring roles to baddies like Venom. They also typically remember to make their movies at least a little fun, and encourage their stars to flex their movie-star charisma. The Rock was reportedly keen on playing this character, but you’d never know it from his dour, bored performance.
The film buffs at Criterion Cast recently took a break from their usual discussion of the likes of Ozu, Godard, and Cox for in their year-end podcast review of the 2012 year in movies. Rather surprisingly to me, they talked up Batman: Year One and Dredd as two underrated 2012 releases. I had been happily ignoring both, but checked them out on Netflix and was soundly disappointed by both.
I used to be a big comics fan, but haven’t followed them in years. It seems both Marvel and DC Comics have since started animation factories cranking out adaptations of some of their more famous stories.
I’m sorry to say that Batman: Year One is inferior in every way to the original comics from the 1980s (which I believe I still have copies of somewhere). It takes a number of liberties from the source material, about which I’m ambivalent. Movies are movies, and comics are comics, and any adaptation from one to the other ought to make as many changes as the artists/writers/filmmakers/whatever wish. But a necessary question that immediately follows is: what was it about the source material that made it worthwhile in the first place, and how can it be preserved? Or at least translated or transformed to be equally exciting in another medium?
The Batman: Year One movie failed to capture much about the comics that has made them classics. At one point in the movie, a character tosses a photograph onto a table, rendered in David Mazzucchelli’s art style from the original comics. Intended as an homage, it merely emphasizes the unimaginative and bland animation style.
Without the timelessly stylized artwork, all you have left is Frank Miller’s hardboiled writing and plotting, which looks a little thin in the cold light of day.
I really wanted to like The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan (also cowriter with brother Jonathan) and star Christian Bale have long proved themselves thoughtful, serious filmmakers, but if they have one common flaw it might be a terminal deficiency of levity. The Dark Knight inarguably has all the hallmarks of quality, intelligence, and craft, but it makes a miscalculation in tone.
Aspiring to the cinematic heights of epic crime melodramas like Heat and The Godfather Part II, The Dark Knight overshoots the limits of its source material and becomes oppressively grim and depressing. One of the film’s marketing taglines was The Joker’s catchphrase “Why so serious?”, a question it should have taken to heart itself. Batman is, after all, a dude who dresses up in a rubber bat suit with pointy ears.
The Dark Knight takes its name from the seminal 1980s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns by comics auteur Frank Miller, but is not an adaptation. At this point, an adaptation would be redundant anyway, as Miller’s general tone and interpretation of the character as an obsessed, psychotic loner has informed every Batman film so far. Spider-Man 2 remains, for me, the only film adaptation of a comic book superhero property to strike the right balance between comics’ heightened reality and cinema’s more grounded literalness.
Pick a card… joker’s wild
This blogger grew up with Tim Burton’s two original Batman films, which took the character “seriously” insofar as giving him a reasonably plausible psychological motivation. But they also plopped the character down in an obviously fantastical parallel universe in which such things as rocket-powered penguins and literal death by laughter were real. In contrast, the two Nolan / Bale films drain all the wit and whimsy from the core Batman mythos, and place him in a decaying, corrupt, crime-ridden city straight out of 1940s pulp noir novels.
Living in modern-day New York City, it’s almost impossible for me to imagine Russian and Italian organized crime families being so powerful as to commandeer five big city banks for money laundering purposes, and yet that is a key plot point in the supposedly serious and realistic The Dark Knight. Indeed, any viewer of The Wire and The Sopranos will know that what contemporary organized crime families are capable of is far more mundane. Comic book fans will realize this is the same mistake often made in post-80s comic books: mistaking bloody murder and mayhem for “realism.” If The Dark Knight wanted to be taken so seriously, it could have begun by tweaking its depiction of the contemporary real world.
Internet rumor has it that Christian Bale is in this movie
Every emotion, motivation, and plot point is pushed to such an absurd degree of pretentious gravity and self-seriousness that it almost becomes comic. The precise moment where the film irrevocably lost me is the scene in which the grievously disfigured Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) bellows at Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) from his hospital bed, commanding him to speak his old derogatory nickname gleaned from years of working internal affairs cases: Two-Face. The performances were so exaggeratedly despairing and melodramatic that I frankly started to laugh.
What little deliberate humor there is is misplaced and awkward. As before, there is some levity to be mined from Bruce Wayne’s deliberate pretense to aimless trust-fund wastrel. Most of Alfred’s reliably dry dialogue amuses, mostly thanks to Michael Caine’s superlative ability to command the audience’s attentions and sympathies. But other stabs at humor misfire; during The Joker’s extended siege on Harvey Dent’s motorcade, one of the security guards provides a running commentary on the proceedings, as if the audience needed any verbal cue that an about-to-be collision with a tumbling helicopter is a bad thing indeed.
The action, while spectacular, is nevertheless mostly plausible, save for Batman and Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal)’s fall of some 20 stories from Wayne’s penthouse apartment onto the roof of a car. How is it even remotely believable that they could survive without a scratch? I doubt such a plot device would pass muster in a vintage Batman comic book.
An outtake from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice
The performances are good all around, but The Dark Knight could very well be subtitled the Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart Show. Christian Bale, the ostensible star of the proceedings, is given little to do. I assume his hoarse Batman voice is meant, in story terms, to prevent him from being recognized as Bruce Wayne while also making him sound more scary. Instead, he seems asthmatic and out of breath. Morgan Freeman summons his reliable gravitas to plays Batman’s supremely capable beard, Lucius Fox, the nominal head of Wayne Industries. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a huge improvement over Katie Holmes. Although just as young and stylish, it is slightly easier to suspect disbelief that she is the top District Attorney in Gotham. Gary Oldman provides another example of his ability to subsume his physical appearance behind makeup and props (as in Hannibal and Dracula), but here he is all cuddly fatherly warmth and righteous but fair vengeance (basically a retread of his characterization of Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films).
Hey, there’s a female presence in this movie?
Setting aside the nostalgia and goodwill surrounding his premature death, Heath Ledger is indeed amazing. Even if he hadn’t died shortly after completing the role, his performance as The Joker would likely be remembered alongside other classic cinema nightmares: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter, and Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Se7en. One of the best aspects of the character is the clear emphasis that he’s not in the least bit interested in the traditional pasttimes of Batman’s colorful rogues’ gallery. Rather, his aim is to foment anarchy, even self-aware enough to ask “Do I look like a man with a plan?” He does occasionally let rip with a maniacal laugh on a par with the great Jokers of the past (no less all-time great scenery chewers than Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero, but most of the time he’s creepiest when not even smiling.
One nice idea that isn’t fully developed is that this Joker doesn’t have the standard comic book “secret origin.” This Joker tells two very different stories explaining how he became both physically and mentally scarred. It’s possible he may not even remember how he became the way he is, but even if he does, does it matter? Which is all the more scary.
It’s probably my own fault for buying into the hype, but Superman Returns left me cold. There’s not a lot of drama implicit in the story of an omnipotent alien from another planet, and I just can’t buy the “god walks among us” metaphors.
Spider-Man is a real, troubled human being burdened with great responsibility; Batman is a human being wracked with guilt and obsessed with revenge; Daredevil is a literally broken man overcompensating for far more than just his disability. With Superman, it’s just plain hard to relate to an alien, even if he suffers such petty human problems as unrequited love.
An obvious point of conflict is conspicuously absent: instead of any jealousy or anger from Richard White (James “Cyclops” Marsden), he simply acquieses to his romantic rival. It’s more like Superman to be above & beyond mere mortal jealousy; what makes White so noble? Perhaps he’s intimidated by Superman’s sheer potency. Just as the character is defined by nepotism (he’s the Daily Planet’s editor-in-chief’s son), Marsden is Bryan Singer‘s X-Man star who was conspicuously erased very early in Brett Ratner’s X3. Hmm…
Unsurprisingly, Parker Posey is far and away the best thing in Superman Returns.
Another disappointment: whereas Spider-Man 2 exuded a strong sense of New York, the Metropolis of Superman Returns is a blank, generic city without character. It’s a timeless locale – the present, yet nostalgic – where when a superhero returns from across the galaxy to save them, the citizens all run out and buy newspapers.
As for the cast, Parker Posey wins for best screen presence. While Kevin Spacey gurns, hams, and scenery-chomps, she scores laughs with mere looks on her face. There was a lot of concern over the casting of a relatively inexperienced former soap star for the lead, but I thought Brandon Routh was just fine. Kate Bosworth (made up to look like Rachel McAdams), however, is was too young to be plausible as a star journalist with a five-year-old kid, and to be at all appealing to (yes I have to say it again) an omnipotent alien from another planet. Points detracted for dull, overhyped outtakes of Marlon Brando’s mumbled improv bullshit, and shafting screen legend Eva Marie Saint with about 5 minutes of screen time.
For all the negative buzz regarding V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore’s total disavowal of James McTeigue’s adaptation, I was surprised to find that the film kept far closer to the book than I expected. Closer, in fact, than the two other travesties of Moore’s comics, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s better than both, if by itself still not very good.
It’s impossible for me to imagine how I would have reacted had I not read the book several times, but I suspect I would have had very mixed feelings either way. When it comes to movies based on comics, it’s the prerogative of every fan to obsess over “what they changed.” So let me point out a few changes I feel illustrate how the filmmakers either misunderstood or deliberately warped some key themes that make the book what it is.
“The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.”
First, the dystopian state of Great Britain as seen in the film is in a far less desperate state than in the book. The book opens with Evey at the absolute end of hope, her parents dead and herself alone, blacklisted and unable to survive. She makes a misguided and pathetic attempt to prostitute herself, runs afoul of the corrupt police, and is “saved” (in more ways than one) by V. Her susceptibility to V’s seduction is much more plausible if she herself is already a victim of the state. In the film, as played by Natalie Portman, she’s a rather happy person with a regular job, and her encounter with V is motivated by a redundant invented character called Deitrich. Every theme Deitrich represents is already covered by the character Valerie (which is, incidentally, lifted almost unaltered from the book).
But perhaps the biggest deviation is the very nature of the fascist state Great Britain has become. In the book, it’s something that just happens; a form of order that arises out of the chaos following a nuclear world war. In the film, the great societal disruption is a conspiracy machinated by a cabal of shadowy old white men, who then step in and profit from the reconstruction. Of course, the filmmakers are obviously reaching for an analogy to the Bush Administration, Carlyle Group, Halliburton, etc. While that may make the story of the film relevant to today, it obscures a more powerful point of the book: it’s far more scary when fascism arises out of the common consent of the people, as it did with Nazi Germany.
