Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

There’s a reason you never hear a huckster holler “rotten fish!” Not even the most energetic and unethical salesman could sell anyone on a bucket of chum like this. Here’s a tip for your superhero movie: when the story’s villain makes his appearance, the audience should not be saying, “Wait, who is this guy?” It turns out, in this case, he’s some leftover character from the first Aquaman movie—one who apparently made so little impression that the viewer here has no idea who he is, why he does what he does, or even if he’s really a bad guy. And that’s one of the clearer aspects of this turd. This a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be, on a grand scale. It suffers from sloppy storytelling throughout. The tone is inconsistent from one scene to the next: one moment it wants to be a buddy comedy, the next it’s a ponderously epic and ultra-serious drama, and then after that it’s all CGI-drenched action sequence—then lather, rinse, repeat. The whole piece is just a ridiculous mishmash of a film that has no guiding idea. Even in its best moments the script is clumsy and uninspired. And then, on top of all that, add in some really bad acting. Not even Jason Momoa's typically charismatic presence can redeem this fundamentally flawed exercise in brainless spectacle. Honestly, a student filmmaker with no particular knowledge of comic books could have made a better movie than this. Perhaps that hints at the real problem with these DC flicks: there’s too much focus on trying to be grandiose. A smaller story with a tighter, more human-scale focus might serve these characters better. Trying to make everything epic just leads to absurdity—and to these kinds of polluted waters. Stay out of this sea, for your own good.