The question that “Black Adam” poses is a simple one: What happens when Hollywood’s most risk-averse movie star collides with Hollywood’s most risk-averse movie genre? The answer provided by complex is, of course, even simpler: Exactly what you’d expect.
Only worse.All due respect to whatever unique and illustrious history Black Adam may have developed since his DC Comics debut in 1945, but the lifeless spectacle that director Jaume Collet-Serra — who made some nifty thrillers before “Jungle Cruise” reduced him to the John Ford of Rawson Marshall Thurbers — has cobbled together for the character’s big screen origin story is so exhaustingly derivative of other superhero movies that the ancient Egyptian antihero might as well not have any history at all.The problems stem from an irreconcilable mismatch between star and subject.
Part of the issue is that playing the Scorpion King does not, in fact, make someone
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