Black Adam isn’t a full-on course correction for the DCEU, but it is an encouraging new installment in this larger universe. Collet-Serra knows how to present this darkness and antihero in a way that’s effective, while also fleshing out one of the most promising additions to DC’s ever-expanding cadre of characters.

The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.

Though suffering from repetitive plot beats and thin characters, Black Adam is powered by Johnson's performance and its promise of an exciting future.

Try as it might to capture lightning in a bottle, Black Adam never manages to find its spark.

There could still be some cinematic potential in Black Adam, perhaps in contrasting his grim demeanor with the eternally sunny Shazam in some kind of crossover sequel. But this Black Adam was already a long time coming. And it wasn’t really worth the wait.

Viewed as a light star vehicle with a lot of VFX — a soft Rock movie — it’s simply ho-hum. The issue is with everything else happening onscreen around him. Even by the DCEU’s dodgy standards, it’s a mess in a cape.

Most disappointing of all, Black Adam is one of the most visually confounding of the major-studio superhero sagas, between CG that’s assaultively unappealing and rapid-fire editing that sucks the exhilaration right out of every fight scene.

If the entire function of "Black Adam" is to set up a fight between Adam and Superman, as Johnson has said in public, perhaps skip a "Black Adam" movie and make only a 50-minute-long fight sequence. "Black Adam" is so hard to watch, it might make us want to skip the pretense that these are meant to be real movies.

The problem isn’t that Johnson can’t act — he definitely can! — the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He still wants the simple idolatry that a kid might have for their favorite athlete. He wants to be larger than life. But even the biggest of movie stars need to be a little smaller than that in order to give people something to watch, and not just look up to.

The Rock arrives with the power of a pebble in the new action movie “Black Adam,” in which the popular star plays the titular anti-hero in his first solo outing. It’s just as thoughtless and rancid as the rest of DC Comics’ crummy catalog.