Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam (2010)

Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam arrived in 2010 as the longest entry in the DC Showcase line of direct-to-video shorts, a twenty-four minute exercise in which two caped men take turns striking a third caped man. George Newbern and Jerry O'Connell reprise their television roles, James Garner provides his final performance as the wizard, and the entire enterprise concludes without having advanced a single cultural argument. We searched. We found nothing.

The film's lone moment of moral instruction arrives when Billy Batson, transformed into Captain Marvel and on the verge of killing his enemy, is stopped by Superman and told that justice and revenge are not the same thing. This is generic superhero sermonizing, the sort that has been standard since the medium's infancy. The story's ethical architecture is older still, drawn from the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man and a wizard's ancient regret over a champion who went bad. Pride, envy, greed, hatred. Sunday school material with better lighting.

Elsewhere, a dam collapses and floods a city, though the film treats this as spectacle and nothing more. A homeless man turns out to be a guardian tiger. An orphan lives in a slum and is menaced by teenagers who reappear in the final scene so the hero can enjoy a private joke. Black Adam's backstory spans five thousand years of vaguely Egyptian mythology, and the film declines to racialize a single frame of it. No character is examined through the lens of identity, no economic order is indicted, no body is celebrated, no mind is diagnosed. The residue is a straightforward adventure about a boy, a wizard, and a very old grudge. It registers near zero on every contemporary measure, and it seems entirely at peace with that.