Black Adam
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: October 21, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
41
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 52 Critic Reviews
Positive:
9
Mixed:
25
Negative:
18
Watch Now
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Stream On
Expand

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
38
ObserverDylan RothOct 21, 2022
There are individual scenes, individual moments of action and even characters that actually work, but as a whole, Black Adam is a tangled, cluttered mess. Read full review
38
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenOct 21, 2022
Once it gets going, Black Adam feels like a continuous closed loop of destruction where the moments of mayhem blend darn near seamlessly one into the other. And those special effects look incredibly cheesy. Read full review
38
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyOct 20, 2022
All kinds of stuff happens. Much of it is loud, confusing, and badly paced. From a superhero-movie perspective, it’s the last one of those three that’s most problematic. Leaden and flaccid are a bad combination. Read full review
35
The AtlanticDavid SimsOct 21, 2022
Johnson once excelled at playing anti-heroes you could root for and boo cheerfully all in one breath, but now he’s just another silent grump who’s never allowed to lose a fight. Read full review
35
SlashfilmWitney SeiboldOct 18, 2022
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. Read full review
35
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeOct 18, 2022
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. Read full review
33
IndieWireDavid EhrlichOct 18, 2022
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. Read full review
30
ABC NewsPeter TraversOct 21, 2022
Question for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: What happened, dude? How did your passion project playing a Black DCEU posterboy for anger management become a humorless, chaotic bummer that leaves you holding the bag for an epic failure to launch? Read full review
30
Paste MagazineAbby OlceseOct 20, 2022
It all adds up to another frantic grab by a studio desperate to wring success from a superhero universe they’ve never fully understood. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleTrace SauveurOct 20, 2022
Maybe they thought that for the amount of time this movie had been gestating it just had to be something special. But for as long as this thing has been cooking, the end result is seriously underbaked. Read full review
28
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzOct 20, 2022
Johnson, who is also a producer here, having shepherded Black Adam through a decade and a half of development, gets off relatively easy. The real victim, or perhaps perpetrator, is Collet-Serra. Read full review
25
Movie NationRoger MooreOct 20, 2022
The cut-and-paste writing and lackluster direction are the main failings. There’s little to this that you’d call a “story,” even less “story” that makes sense. Read full review
25
The PlaylistJason BaileyOct 18, 2022
A joyless, glacially paced compendium of interchangeable scenes of people floating around in their goofy masks and capes, tossing clichéd dialogue and CG lightning bolts, and punching each other into buildings. Read full review
25
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiOct 18, 2022
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. Read full review
20
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithOct 21, 2022
Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff. Read full review
20
The New York TimesMaya PhillipsOct 20, 2022
If, as the credits roll for Black Adam, you’re still stuck wondering what defines a bad hero or a good antihero, know that at least the film clarifies one thing: What makes a bad hero movie. Read full review
20
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyOct 18, 2022
Why is Dwayne Johnson delivering every line here in an exhausting monotone? Read full review
0
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 20, 2022
Seriously, don’t see Black Adam. Don’t encourage this. I don’t even want to admit that it’s an actual movie, but assuming it is, it’s the worst of the year — and one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Read full review
More From This Movie

41 Critic Reviews

6.9 User Reviews

Details & Credits|Trailers

Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
1 81 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
2 77 Project Hail Mary
3 75 Send Help
4 73 Hoppers
5 71 The Sheep Detectives
SEE ALL
Essential Links
New on Amazon Prime Video
New on Netflix
Coming Soon to DVD/Blu-ray
SEE ALL