“Black Adam”, the latest in our current reality of multiple CGI superhero spectacles per year, feels built on paradoxes. Some of those paradoxes are peculiar to this specific story, and others emerge from general recurring issues with the film’s relationship to the DC empire, and superhero films at large. In this way, “Black Adam” is rarely as egregious an example of superhero malaise as much as the general response to it suggests. And yet, it’s instructive to think of all the way all the things that might work – and occasionally do work – in “Black Adam” feel compulsively neutered by the things that don’t work.
Even as competing conglomerates Marvel and DC feign progressive ideologies in their casting practices, the current slate of superhero cinema still feels hegemonic, whether in its whiteness or in its blinkered Americana. “Black Adam” offers a welcome rejection of both, at first—a potentiality that the film finds itself grappling with to diminishing returns.
