The following contains spoilers for Black Adam, now playing in theaters.
At the heart of Black Adam is the fight between Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson) and the Justice Society's Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), who perceive noble acts in entirely different lights. Hawkman is a more traditional hero, attempting to save all lives -- even those of his enemies. Adam is far less conflicted about morality and casually kills a lot of people in the film.
Black Adam is rooted in this conflict, the question of morality when it comes to mortal decisions and whether that defines heroism or not. But for all of Black Adam and Hawkman's arguments about the concept, none of it works as succinctly as Adam's western-inspired quickfire shoot-out, which ties Adam to a very different heroic lineage than the traditional superhero genre.
What Is Black Adam's Silliest Moment?
After freeing Black Adam from his eons of slumber, Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) and her brother Karim (Mohammed Amer) witness the anti-hero decimate the Intergang forces who'd arrived to slay them. But he's knocked out by an Eternium-enhanced missile, and the two bring Adam back to their home to recuperate. Upon awakening -- and being barraged with questions by Adrianna's excitable superhero fanboy son, Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) -- Adam decides to simply leave the conversation by casually floating through the wall into the apartment's living room. Doing so, he finds Karim watching a Clint Eastwood film, during a climatic shootout that draws out the gun draw. Unsure of the TV, Adam lashes out with a bolt of electricity and destroys it.
However, later in Black Adam, Adam gets the chance to live such a moment. While protecting Amon and Adrianna from a group of Intergang soldiers, he stares down several of them. The film -- which largely had been defined by massive effects as a result of Adam's immense power levels and varied abilities -- shifts. It suddenly takes the style and tone of a western, flipping between the various characters as they try to decide what to do and prepare for the gunfight that's about to erupt. As soon as it does, the impervious Black Adam -- making little finger guns as he does so -- shoots down each of the soldiers with lightning blasts, ignoring the gunshots against him.
What Black Adam's Funniest Moment Says About the Character
It's Black Adam's silliest moment, a reminder of the dangers that superheroes and supervillains can offer to regular people -- but unlike earlier beats, like when Black Adam was more or less disintegrating people with his bare hands, the moment is played for comedy. The tension of the filmmaking is hilariously undercut by the reality of the context, and in a film that some critics have slammed as humorless, it's a fun and somewhat inventive beat. But it's also a perfectly quick summation of Black Adam as a character, tying him quietly to the legacy of antiheroes like Clint Eastwood's the Man With No Name rather than more traditional figures from his own genre.
It highlights the simple difference between Black Adam and someone like Hawkman or Superman -- who does good things for good reasons in the film but with a brutal edge completely divorced from any modern ideal of morality. Similar to the anti-heroes of the kind of westerns referenced in the beat, Adam will fight those that threaten him and others -- but he has no restraints when it comes to death, even when his power level makes it an afterthought to defeat foes otherwise. Black Adam's silliest moment speaks volumes about the kind of character Adam is designed after -- especially considering that, in interviews with places like CinemaBlend, Johnson has cited Eastwood specifically as an inspiration. Adam's shoot-out beat is funny but also succinctly sums up what makes Adam different from other superheroes.
To see him emulate a western anti-hero, see Black Adam in theaters now.