This DCEU sequel drowns in its own dampness.
This has been a very bad year for the DCEU. “Shazam: Fury of the Gods,” “The Flash,” and “Blue Beetle” have all bombed miserably at the box office. I liked “The Flash” for its silly appeal, while I disliked “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” for its gloomy approach and felt “Blue Beetle” was selling itself short. And now, we have “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” which is just as lame as you’d expect. Jason Momoa reprises his role as Arthur Curry, A.K.A. Aquaman, who is now married to the warrior princess Mera (unfortunately still played by Amber Heard) and has a baby boy named Arthur, Jr. The jokes are supposed to be hilarious when he pees in Arthur’s mouth and when he tries to avoid it, his wife directs the baby’s urine in his mouth. All I can say is at least we didn’t see any baby crap.
That’s just the beginning of things. Another thing is the story which regards environmentally saving the planet. I’m against pollution, and I want a teleportation device so I don’t have to drive my car, but the story regarding it seems self-congratulatory, considering all the technology and electricity the movie needs in order to be filmed. Especially if the budget is $205 million. But anyway, Aquaman’s enemy Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) wants revenge on him for killing his father in the last movie by stealing the kingdom’s orichalcum reserves to give him full power, which would ultimately make our planet warmer, which would eventually lead to our extinction. We’re already on the verge of that enough as it is.
That same villain also finds a black trident, which belongs to a hidden kingdom that vow revenge on humanity. And so, he comes consumed with dark magic. You know. The kind that gives him green eyes. The marine biologist Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park) tries to be his voice of reasoning, but is treated like his manipulated henchman.
Aquaman tries to tell the council they need to make themselves known to the surface world, but you know how these people get. They refuse to do so for reasons we’ve seen before, and BLAH BLAH BLAH, I don’t care. So, if they won’t help him deal with this mess, then his only recourse is to free his imprisoned half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) from a desert prison. His mother (Nicole Kidman) and father-in-law (Dolph Lundgren) both give him a suit that would make him survive the hot, sandy environment and be invisible. Although, it doesn’t leave to the imagination. When Orm asks if he has drinking water, he tells him he drank it all because it’s so hot. In “Dune,” they had suits that converted sweat into fresh drinking water. That was brilliant stuff.
Oh, and they also give Aquaman an octopus to help him with the extraction, and he doesn’t do anything special, but squirt water, squeeze through holes, and rolls around.
As you expect in a narrative like this, they have to deal with brotherly clichés (with Orm telling Aquaman not to call him “brother”), a fish crime lord (voiced by Martin Short), and whatever Black Manta throws at them.
Maybe some of the humor has some smiles, the movie likes use Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” and John Rhys Davies has some energy as the voice of the Brine King, who joins Aquaman in battle. So, they’re among the very few bright spots, but “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” doesn’t justify itself. The actors seem like they’re having fun with the campy entertainment, but it’s all by the numbers with the action, 3D effects, story, jokes, and character development. They come and go, and who said it would also be funny when Aquaman tells Orm that cockroaches are a delicacy, and that he would eventually put one in his burger?
Let’s not and say we did.