Lots of commotion, too few thrills

   

   Dwayne Johnson finds a superpower showcase in Black Adam, the latest entry into the DC Comics Universe. Johnson plays a character with superpowers but his Adam also has a vengeful side, which is supposed to make him more interesting — at least on paper.

   A noise machine built around a flood of unimpressive action, the movie features many battles in which bolts of lightning shoot from the fingertips of heroes and villains. There's enough zapping here to run a zillion microwaves but none of it has much real charge.

   A prologue explains how Adam acquired his superpowers by taking us back the ancient kingdom of Kahndaq where an enslaved Adam loses his wife and young son and finds himself in a state of suspended animation (or something like it) for 5,000 years. 

   Thanks to Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) Adam is revived in present-day Kahndaq,  a Middle Eastern-style country that is being invaded by militaristic thugs. The people of Kahndaq are not free.

   Adrianna comes into possession of a crown (well, it had to be something) that everyone else in the movie seems to want. Why not? It's made of Eternium. Ah, you say, that explains everything.

  Later, Adrianna’s son Amon (Bohdi Sabongui) will be kidnapped and Adrianna will implore Adam to help rescue the kid.

   Another story intersects with Adam’s. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) wants to combat Adam by assembling a special team dubbed The Justice Society. Calling this four-member group a "society" stretches the term, but I guess Justice Quartet would impose too severe a limit on future growth.

   Society members include Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). An idiosyncratic array of powers, none of them especially intriguing, is distributed throughout the group.

    Toward the end, the movie goes sentimental over the friendship between Hawkman and the self-sacrificing Doctor Fate. My heart strings remained unplucked.  

    Adam, who flies but more often seems to float like a balloon in a Thanksgiving day parade, wants revenge for the murder of his wife and son five millennia ago.  Say this: The man knows how to hold a grudge.

   The only looming question: Will Adam unite with the Justice Society to help save Amon, presumably so that the kid can continue skate boarding through Kahndaq’s deteriorating streets?

   The future of a free Khandaq may also hang in the bargain.

   Not enough? Eventually, a character called Sabbac  (Marwan Kenzari) emerges to lead the legions of hell against …well … just about everyone. 

    Oh well, I liked the name. Sabbac has ring to it, don’t you think? 

    The movie makes attempts at humor but they are, for the most part, just that: attempts.

     To make the already obvious even clearer, the movie uses the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black to underline some of the clangorous action. 

      Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s best bit arrives in a postscript that involves a surprise appearance. Talk about too little too late.

    Will there be more Black Adam movies? I don't know but it might be best to say Shazam and hope for the best.

    And if you don’t know about Shazam, don’t worry. You’ll probably be doing something else this weekend anyway.

Four men hold an epic meeting

 

     A wave of sadness swept over me when I finished watching One Night in Miami. The movie isn’t particularly sad. In fact, it's lively, provocative, and engaging. 

    But I also realized that all but one of the movie's principal, real-life characters — football and movie star Jim Brown — are dead.   Brown is now 84. Had Muhammad Ali, another of the movie's characters lived, he’d be on the verge of turning 74. 

     So I guess the sadness has to do with the passing of a cultural guard, all of whose members were prominent figures during the tumultuous 1960s, a time when I was still young.

     Set in 1964, the movie introduces us to an Ali who was about to claim his boxing title and to announce his decision to join the Nation of Islam. Most Americans then knew him as Cassius Clay, a mouthy kid from Louisville.

    The other main characters in director Regina King’s movie are singer/songwriter Sam Cooke and activist Malcolm X.

    In the hands of King and screenwriter Kemp Powers, who adapted his 2013 play, the movie stands as an informed construction of what might have been discussed as the men gathered on the night Clay defeated Sonny Liston, an outcome that shocked nearly everyone in the boxing world except Clay.

     All the characters are going through major life changes. Tired of football, Brown ponders retiring from the NFL.  Clay’s victory came on the eve of his ascendance to global stardom. 

     Cooke, perhaps the most satisfied of the group, was plotting further commercial success, and a troubled Malcolm X was about to break with the Nation of Islam.

    A gifted actress, King moves behind the camera easily. She provides a fluid cinematic prologue and finds ways to escape the confines of Malcolm X’s suite in the Hampton House, a Miami hotel with a mostly black clientele.

    As the men solidify and test their friendships, the movie  becomes a complex mixture of brotherly love, mutual admiration, chiding banter, and sharply stated positions.

    As Clay, Eli Goree often plays the surprising role of peacemaker. Kingsley Ben-Adir creates a smart, ideologically devoted Malcolm who's more rigid than any of his companions, even as he fears for the safety of his family. As Jim Brown, Aldis Hodge creates a character of strength and conviction.

     None of the men treat the others as icons, even though each of them understands that none of them can be considered "ordinary." They're all too famous for that.

   One Night revolves around debates about the best way forward for black men in 1964. Economics? Political action? Learning to turn a racist system to one’s advantage? 

    Leslie Odom Jr.’s Sam Cooke creates the sharpest conflict with Malcolm X.  At one point, Malcolm X chides Cooke for not having written a song as relevant as Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. 

    Malcolm plays the role of provocateur, spoilsport, and conscience. Neither Brown nor Cooke is ready to renounce wine, women and song -- and they're not shy about letting Malcolm know where they stand.

     One Night becomes tribute to the characters depicted, to the actors who play them, and to the way it makes an event that took place almost 60 years ago feel intensely present.

     Malcolm was murdered in 1965. Later in 1964, Cooke was killed later in a shooting at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles. He was 33. Ali, of course, died in 2016. 

    One Night takes us to a moment when the men were all young, vital and relevant. Because their conversations haven't lost much currency, One Night never becomes an exercise in nostalgia. It's got plenty of bite and although it's about a now-fading moment, it hasn’t lost its relevance.

When a woman's abuser can't be seen

Elisabeth Moss dominates a smart new version of The Invisible Man.

Her antagonist may be invisible, but the same can't be said for Elisabeth Moss. The actress dominates nearly every scene of The Invisible Man, a #MeToo-influenced take on the 1897 novel by H.G. Wells.

The setup: Brilliant scientist Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) has been abusing his wife, Moss's Cecilia. After Cecilia leaves him in the movie's pulse-pounding prolog, Adrian feigns his death. The twist: He's able to make himself invisible so that he can torment Cecilia. He refuses to let her go.

As Adrian begins to make his invisible presence felt, director Leigh Whannell creates plenty of high tension, punctuated by a few nicely placed jumps scares.

There's no mystery about what's happening to Cecilia, but Whannell wrings suspense out of Cecilia's situation: She can't convince anyone else that her former husband isn't dead. We're left to wonder when and how Mr. Invisible will strike next.

The screenplay, also by Whannell, adds some tasty complications. Turns out that Adrian's lawyer brother Tom (Michael Dorman) is the executor of the scientist's estate. He tells Cecilia that she's been left $5 million by Adrian, money that will be doled out in $100,000 installments.

Although the focus remains on Cecilia, additional characters turn up. Harriet Dyer plays Cecilia's sister, a woman with whom Cecilia hasn't always gotten along. Aldis Hodge portrays James, a cop who takes Cecilia into his suburban home when she's fleeing her husband. James' teenage daughter (Storm Reid) bonds with Cecilia. Reid's character wants to study design. Cecilia is an architect by trade.

Strong atmospherics add to the gathering unease. Whannell turns his camera into a stalker, giving us the Invisible Man's point of view at times when it's most frightening. He skillfully deals with the standard elements of horror, a scene in which Cecilia enters an attic in hopes of confronting her nemesis.

Scenes in the mental institution where Cecilia eventually finds herself are chilling and give Moss an opportunity for some Grand Guignol theatrics.

Moreover, Adrain's house -- the place where he maintains his lab -- is a tour de force of icy modernism, full of sleek surfaces that give you the impression that in Adrian's house, nothing has ever been misplaced. Adrian hasn't allowed an ounce of warmth to penetrate his retreat.

Now, it would be misleading if I didn't tell you that the story falters here and there and the whole idea of building a movie around the notion that someone has mastered the art of becoming invisible remains ... well ... preposterous.

But Whannell, who acted in the Saw movies and who wrote and directed Upgrade, clearly has chops for this kind of movie. He also demonstrates that he's paid attention to Alfred Hitchcock's understanding of how to create a menacing mood.

Now, I said that the movie seems like a spawn of the #MeToo moment. That's true -- and also obvious. It's worth pointing out an irony, though. Many of those accused of sexually and psychologically abusing women hardly could be called invisible. They were protected by their visibility and power.

OK, so The Invisible Man doesn't plumb every inch of metaphoric depth contained in its principal conceit. But Moss and Whannell serve up enough chills to make the movie as effective as James Whale's 1933 version. and unlike many wise-ass forays into the pop-cultural closet, The Invisible man wastes no time winking at us. It's smart enough to take itself seriously, which makes it easy for us to follow suit.

What men want? Maybe less contrivance?

Taraji P. Henson stars in What Men Want, a comedy about a sports agent who can hear men’s thoughts.

Taraji P. Henson finds a big-screen showcase in What Men Want, a gender-flipping version of 2000's What Women Want, a movie that featured Mel Gibson as a Chicago ad man who has an accident and suddenly is able to hear women's thoughts. Guess what? A macho man becomes more sensitive.

In the female version -- directed by Adam Shankman -- Henson portrays Ali Davis, an Atlanta-based sports agent who's constantly passed over for a partnership she’s more than earned. In the male-dominated world of sports agency, Ali works with a major handicap. Try as she may, she's just not one of the boys. How could she be? The boys are making all the rules.

Henson dominates the movie, but can't entirely rise above the movie's sitcom conceits. In this version, Henson's Ali hits her head and suddenly can hear what men are thinking. She's initially appalled but soon realizes that this unique skill might give her the edge she needs to win the partnership she's craving -- and which her performance record clearly justifies.

Formulaic and predictable, the movie does include one bit of oddball casting that clicks: Erykah Badu plays Sister, a long-haired psychic with fingernails that resemble talons. Sister is hired by one of Ali's girlfriends to work a bachelorette party for a soon-to-be-married gal pal.

The cast also includes Josh Brener, as Ali's gay assistant, Tracy Morgan as the father of a prime basketball prospect (Shane Paul McGhie) that Ali is determined to sign. Richard Roundtree plays Ali's dad, a widower who runs a boxing gym and has instilled his daughter with a spirit of toughness.

Aldis Hodge does love-interest duty as Will, a single dad who works as a bartender and who catches Ali's eye. Hodge's Will eventually gets caught in strained plot antics in which Ali decides to fake a marriage to impress Morgan's Joe "Dolla" Barry, a self-proclaimed family man. She thinks the ruse will help her to sign Joe's son.

A variety of athletes turn up for cameos. Among them: Grant Hill, Shaquille O'Neal, and Karl-Anthony Towns.

The movie tries to find the kind of raunchy spirit that enlivened last year's much funnier Girls Trip but the R-rated results are mixed.

Hollywood comedies have a tendency to get preachy, so it's no surprise that before the picture ends, Ali must realize that she doesn't have to play a man's game to succeed. She needn't concern herself with what men think: She can make it on her own.

It's almost as if the screenwriters are lecturing both the character and the audience, another instance of a movie that can make you feel as if you're reading a book someone else already has underlined.