Black Adam sees Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) produce and star in his first comic-book franchise film. But where does this character fit in the DC Extended Universe?
Former wrestler Dwayne Johnson is one of the most popular movie stars around, often despite some pretty bad movies.
But people love him anyway, even when he attempts to broaden his acting scope, playing near-villains like Black Adam. No-one believes The Rock can be completely bad.
Unlike, I'm sorry to say, Black Adam which is pretty awful, mainly thanks to the producer. Who turns out to be.... oh dear, Dwayne Johnson.
It suffers from the curse of most DC Comics movies. It's not that they're bad - well, not all of them. They're just so inconsistent.
Where their arch-rivals Marvel Comics have the firm hand of one man at the tiller - head honcho Kevin Feige - DC movies are all over the place. And none more so than Black Adam.
It's nominally connected to a previous movie called Shazam, which it bears very little resemblance to. That was a kids' comedy - sort of early Superman meets the Tom Hanks body-swap comedy Big.
Black Adam, on the other hand opens five thousand years ago, in the mythical kingdom of Kahndac, built on slavery. One slave utters the magic word "Shazam" and becomes superhuman.
The evil king manages to bury him for 5,000 years. Cut to a totally different plot, where modern-day Kahndac is now ruled by evil colonisers.
To kick them out, the local freedom fighters just need one magic doo-dad. Our heroine Adrianna finds it, but in so doing releases an angry 5,000-year-old demigod.
And suddenly we sprint to America, and Viola Davis as that rather unpleasant military leader Amanda Waller. You may remember her as the boss of DC's crime-stoppers the Suicide Squad.
Now she's in charge of another group - the Justice Society.
Wait, I thought they were called the Justice League - you know, with Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and so on? No, different group entirely, charged with taking on Black Adam.
And here they come now. Hello, size-changing Atom Smasher. Grab a seat, Cyclone. You must be Hawkman - it was the wings and feathers that gave you away.
And as the elder statesman - the sort of part that you'd expect to go to Sir Patrick Stewart or Sir Ian McKellen - here's the rather more B-Division Pierce Brosnan.
You'll notice Doctor Fate usually wears a face-concealing helmet, very useful when you want your stuntman to do all those lengthy fight scenes.
You'll notice Adrianna and the rest of the heroic freedom fighters in the first act are mostly sidelined in the rest of the movie. They hardly show up at all in the trailers.
This is to make room for the Rock, who dominates the proceedings despite having very little purpose except to cause mayhem.
What story there is involves some anonymous villains chasing that magic doodad Adrianna planned to use to free the people.
Black Adam wants to kill them all. The Justice Society on the other hand don't want to kill anyone, nervous that the body count of previous DC Comics films has tended to put off the all-important family audience.
What's wrong with Black Adam is what's wrong with the whole of DC's so-called Extended Universe.
Not only does it have very little to do with any of the other DC titles, it's hard to find a coherent through-line in this one.
Who's it about - Arianna and her freedom fighters? The Justice Society? The whole thing has been swamped by the Power of the Rock.
If the DC plan is to combine all the component parts of this two-dimensional Universe into one effective landscape, they're going to need not only a genius, but a ruthless genius.
Failing Lex Luthor, I wonder what James Cameron's doing next year?
