“A bad plan is better than no plan at all.” This is a line that pops up at various points during “Black Adam,” and while it’s meant to be a whimsical comment regarding the task at hand, by its second repetition it starts to feel like the movie apologizing for itself and its muddled storytelling.
That task is the capture of an exceedingly powerful ancient metahuman known as Teth Adam (Dwayne Johnson), and despite the movie’s best efforts to jazz up the increasingly predictable superhero genre — this one doesn’t care if he kills people — “Black Adam” feels like both too much and not enough, and none of its narrative gambits are helped by a sludgy visual style that’s either distractingly artificial or dispiritingly gloomy, except when it manages to be both.