You have to choose your tailor carefully when you're a large person wearing satin, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson...... didn't.

I heard The Rock came back to wrestling as "The Final Boss." C'mon, if you're gonna be a final boss, you gotta have a second form.

PSA

sometimes i am floored at the Depth of My Own Mind

WWE WrestleMania XL Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson & Roman Reigns vs. Cody Rhodes & Seth "Freakin" Rollins Predictions WWE 2K24

Black Adam (2022, dir. Jaume Collet-Serra) - review by Rookie-Critic

Black Adam was a perfectly serviceable superhero action movie. As with all of my big "shared universe" film reviews, I won't be discussing the plot at all as I don't want to spoil it for the people who care to go see it for themselves. What I can talk about is what works in the movie and what doesn't work. What doesn't work is that this movie does feel slapped together, which is wild considering how long its been in development. Characters don't feel fully realized and are just kind of thrown into the arena without much thought as to why or how, only that they are necessary in that situation. Writing that feels convenient comes off as lazy, and a lot of the writing as to what character is where when and exactly how everything plays out feels awfully convenient. The CGI could definitely have been better, as is starting to be the case with most post-Endgame superhero movies, but it wasn't the worst. The villain isn't terribly interesting and the climactic battle feels like it ends before it even begins. The movie just kind of breezes right past the fact that after the first scene he's in, Black Adam just knows how to speak English, despite the fact that he didn't just a few moments before, and not even a slight attempt is made to explain how that could be. There's a romance subplot between two side characters that feels a little shoehorned in. I called the big third act twist reveal about 6 or 7 minutes into the film. There's just a lot of small issues, including a ton of nitpicky plot stuff that I won't go into here because, again, spoilers, but there are enough of the small issues to where the whole thing starts to feel like a big one. Also, and I fully admit that this is a matter of personal preference, but we gotta stop the Hawkman disrespect. He seems like almost the weakest person in this movie, and never makes many major plays (I'm encroaching on plot talk so I'll cut myself off here, but just know that he doesn't do a ton and Hawkman being not great is basically a meme and I don't appreciate it because I think he's a cool character).

What does work, and it works enough to save the film, is The Rock and Pierce Brosnan. I'll be frank and just say that I don't think The Rock is a phenomenal actor, but I do think he has a penchant for humor. Oddly enough, that is what makes his character so engaging. There's a running gag throughout the movie about catchphrases that I very much enjoyed, and every time it came back around it got a laugh. Now, the trope of "ancient being reawakens in the modern world and doesn't understand said modern world" has been done to death at this point, but I found that they were able to mostly pull it off here. The humor of it and The Rock's banter with the modern day characters is charming enough for it to not be cringey. Then there's Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate, who is easily the most fascinating character in the movie. Brosnan plays the Fate with immense class and wisdom and steals practically every scene he's on screen for. It's really sad that no one outside of Black Adam himself is truly fleshed out here because I would have loved to have known more about the Dr. Fate character and would love to get a complete Dr. Fate movie. Hell, I'll even settle for a Justice Society movie that he's just a part of. For me, anything that provides more Dr. Fate in the DCEU is very much welcome. The pros and cons weigh themselves out almost evenly, with the strength of the few pros single-handedly carrying the movie on their backs above all of the many tiny cons to create a great "turn-your-brain-off-and-buckle-up-baby" popcorn movie experience.

Score: 6/10

Currently streaming on HBO Max.

Wow!

Kim Malek isn’t sure if she fully believes in fate. As co-founder of the indie ice cream brand Salt & Straw, she explains it wasn’t a magical hand that led her transition out of the corporate world and into life as an entrepreneur in 2011. Instead, she credits the people around her who encouraged her to move into a line of work that better fit her passion for community building — even if, at the time, her plan was to own only a single store in Portland’s Alberta Arts District rather than a chain with locations across the West Coast and Florida that would come to count Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson among its shareholders.

(via My First Small Business Was a Commitment to My Community)

My inspiration and genuinely the funniest shit I’ve seen all day

It was a meme to Photoshop Dwayne the Rock Johnson so that he had a really short torso, very long legs, no hips, and a large head.

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