Make it stop. Because at this point, we’ve kind of given up on “make it better.”
Warner Brothers and DC finish the job of wasting the great casting coup of their “Justice League” era comic book film adaptations in a dead fish of an Aquaman sequel, “Aquaman and the Lost City.”
It’s a lifeless patchwork of comic book movie “world building” and tropes, pieced together by four credited “story” authors, shot and re-shot, surrounded by rumors that Amber Heard has been edited out of it (She isn’t, but haters gon’hate.) and almost zero buzz.
Even bad buzz might have been better than that.
Earnest efforts to make it jokier, probably at the behest of humorous he-man star Jason Momoa, come to naught. Trying to turn Aquaman’s (somewhat) evil brother (Patrick Wilson) into a sort of Loki figure/foil and object of Aquaman’s fun fail.
And the story is just a “payback” tale from the first “Aquaman” outing, the one where Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) was a villain foiled, and now he’s back to find ancient undersea tech that will end life on Earth and while he’s at it, “take from him what he took from you.”
Because Aquaman’s got a baby boy, now.
Aquaman’s dad (Temuera Morrison, the original Boba Fett) has little useful advice for his man-mountain son.
“Sometimes not giving up is the most heroic thing you can do.”
James Wan & Co. give us CGI sea-creatures voiced by Martin Short and fanboy favorite John Rhys-Davies, to little avail.
Randall Park plays the scientist no one believes in as he looks high and low for proof of Atlantis.At some point, there’s a scene in which he must have been given a bloody nose. Blood turns up in his beard in insert shots later in this edit.
But the people you kind of feel sorry for are Heard, given enough scenes to justify a paycheck, and Nicole Kidman. It’s been years and years since our favorite redheaded Aussie Oscar winner has been in a movie this bad.
There is some environmental messaging in here, which will annoy the same folks who’re made whenever Amber Heard gets work. Aquaman notes the state of the seas and the environment at large and mutters “I’m tired of nothing ever getting done.”
Yes, even Aquaman hates Joe Manchin.
But Momoa flexes, hops on a bike (his first, best destiny is anything with motorcycles in it) and does his damnedest to carry or will this picture into something worth watching — big laughs, macho joking around — “I’m gonna go start a fight.” – all of it looks like he’s trying too hard, and almost none of it works.
At this point, with Marvel over-saturating the “content” marketplace and out of ideas and DC almost never getting it right, make it stop, make it go away or maybe take a break and a breather on this over-exposed genre seem like the best options.
The technology to make these movies eye candy of the first order is here. But the people making them are at a loss for a decent story to put these superheroes in, much less a movie that matters.
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” fails to answer, in any meaningful way divorced from corporate accounting, the question “Why does this exist?”
Rating: PG-13, violence, some profanity
Cast: Jason Momoa, Nicole Kidman, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Temuera Morrison, Randall Park, Dolph Lundgren, Martin Short, Indya Moore, Jani Zhao and Patrick Wilson
Credits: Directed by James Wan, scripted by David Leslie McGoldrick, based on the DC comics. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:04
