The latest DC effort, Aquaman, is middling fun for about 20 minutes—and then it becomes one of the worst films of 2018.
It’s the typical DC garbage can of a film—proof that Warner Bros. has learned almost nothing about making a good comic-book movie since Christian Bale took off the cowl. (Yes, Wonder Woman was good—but it’s the lone exception.)
Jason Momoa returns as big, tattooed, beefy Arthur, the dreamy son of a Lost City of Atlantis queen (Nicole Kidman) and a lowly lighthouse-keeper (Temuera Morrison). He finds the queen washed up on the rocks and takes her home, where she promptly eats his goldfish. (Baahahaha! What a laugh riot! She ate his pet fish!) She gives birth to Arthur, and the origin story part of the movie is well on the way.
We see a few more moments in the young fish-man’s life, including a moment when Arthur is bullied in an aquarium; he gets a tiger shark riled up to the point that it almost breaks through the glass and kills his entire elementary school class. (That would’ve made for an interesting twist.) Momoa eventually shows up in full party mode, and it looks like we could be on our way to some goofy fun.
Alas, like Zack Snyder before him, director James Wan shows that he doesn’t know how to keep a leash on his epic, and this thing goes bonkers in a bad way. After Arthur teams up with Princess Mera (Amber Heard), she of the Little Mermaid hair, they go on some sort of intercontinental trek to find a lost trident, with haphazard locations constantly being captioned at the base of the screen (Rome, the Sahara Desert, the Valley of the Brine, Atlantis, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., etc.).
The search for the powerful trident that will make Arthur the king of Atlantis is but one of many insipid plotlines. There’s also King Orm (Patrick Wilson, looking like he placed last in a Colorado Rockies mascot-costume contest), Arthur’s half-brother and full-time asshole, who is trying to claim the Atlantis throne while threatening war with the Surface People. (That would be us.)
Orm has some sort of alliance with pirates led by the one who will become Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Black Manta is one of Aquaman’s main adversaries in the comics, but here he is, more or less, a side note, with Wan straining to make the character meaningful among all the chaos. The movie has a formidable-enough villain in Orm, but Wan and the scriptwriters felt the need to make Manta a factor—and the result is a nearly 2 1/2-hour movie with way too much going on for it to make any sense. I thought Steppenwolf was the worst-looking DC villain of all time, but here, Manta looks like a reject from Sigmund and the Sea Monsters rather than something from a big-budget Aquaman movie.
Visually, this is yet another movie that thinks it’s Avatar, and that’s never a good thing. In other words, we get a lot of blue mixing with fluorescent colors. (I did like the great white sharks with saddles on them.) It’s yet another Warner Bros. DC movie with spasmodic, cheap-looking CGI in many of the action scenes. The look of this film is far from awe-inspiring.
An embarrassed-looking Willem Dafoe shows up as Vulko, Arthur’s mentor, and is saddled with the film’s silliest line. (“The king has risen!”) Dolph Lundgren gets another late-2018 role (after Creed II) as another underwater king who just sort of stands around as his special-effects hair waves in the water. Julie Andrews has a “fall asleep and you will miss it” voice cameo.
Aquaman can’t decide if it wants to be Avatar 2, or The Mummy Returns … AGAIN! or I Got Muscles, Attitude and I’m Underwater 5 or Creed III: I’m Old and Wet Now. The undeniable charms (and, admittedly, glorious hair) of Momoa can only go so far.
When it comes to comic book movies, Marvel still reigns supreme—and DC doesn’t have a clue.
Aquaman is playing at theaters across the valley, in a variety of formats.