VERDICT: This superhero sequel represents something never before seen in cinema: a boring James Wan movie.
Worse yet, the film is new to cinema: it’s a boring James Wan movie.
Returning director Wan can’t quite seem to land on a tone; the film opens with an extended montage in which Aquaman, aka Arthur (Jason Momoa) discusses spinning various plates as husband, dad, superhero, and king of Atlantis. But then Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) shows up wanting revenge, and when he discovers an ancient spear that allows him to commune with a lost race of aqua-zombies, the villain will gladly destroy the planet as long as he can also execute the Atlantean who killed his father.
If only all the dialogue in David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick’s screenplay were as ripe and ridiculous as Black Manta’s exclamation, “Every time I can’t fix my power suit is another day Aquaman gets to live.” Instead, it’s rife with lazy one-liners that wouldn’t pass muster in a sitcom’s writers’ room, with gags like baby Arthur Jr. urinating in his dad’s face during a diaper change, a bit the movie loves so much it happens twice.
There’s a heavy-handed stab at relevance by working in a metaphor about fossil fuels and the environment, but it’s not much more successful than the jokes. Without a plot that engages or banter for the overqualified cast to exchange, this is a movie so monotonous that it’s not even livened up by the sight of Nicole Kidman as an undersea queen who rides a robot shark.
Visually, Atlantis makes a more visually welcoming sea world than Namor’s kingdom in Wakanda Forever, but there’s still a bright, shiny artificiality that keeps this milieu from ever registering as a real place that matters. The design team has a field day devising fish-mech hybrids like that robot shark or a squid-influenced submarine, not to mention an island of deadly mutant flora and fauna, but these fleeting treats (even in IMAX 3-D) dazzle without providing heft to these sketchy proceedings.
Momoa’s still seemingly having a good time as a party-dude Aquaman, but the actor’s fire is perpetually snuffed by the wet blanket of Patrick Wilson, as the hero’s brother and nemesis. The affable Randall Park has little to do here besides provide exposition and follow the trajectory of Harvey Guillén’s henchman-with-a-conscience character from this summer’s Blue Beetle, a much breezier exercise in superheroics.
In the 45 years since the release of Superman, the 23 years since X-Men, and the 11 years since The Avengers, the novelty of the superhero movie is long gone, demanding that creators discover inventive ways to jazz up the genre. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom leans aggressively into the same old same-old, blatantly ripping off scenes, characters, and ideas from The Empire Strikes Back, Black Panther, and Iron Man, among others, none of which bodes well at a moment when superhero sagas are beginning to wear out their welcome.
There remains a case to be made in defense of these larger-than-life action epics; no genre, no matter how ubiquitous, is the enemy. But entries like this offer nothing but reasons for their extinction.
