Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom Review – 'A disappointing DCEU send-off' – Empire

And so it ends. After 10 years, 15 movies, two Marthas and one Snyder Reduce, the grand DCEU experiment attracts to a detailed. However if you happen to have been hoping for a unifying finale that brings all of the disparate threads collectively for a grand send-off, then you definitely wager on the flawed seahorse. Like its $1.1 billion-earning predecessor — the DCEU’s most profitable graduate by far — Aquaman: The Misplaced Kingdom fully ignores the broader mythology, focusing solely on Momoa’s muscled merman for the saga’s last bow.

Since final we swam collectively, Arthur Curry has married Mera (Amber Heard, largely mute), had an Aquababy (cute, talks to goldfish), been topped king of Atlantis and found that governance is, disappointingly, extra about intransigent paperwork than using round on stingrays. In the meantime, Abdul-Mateen’s David Kane (aka Manta — nonetheless ridiculous, twice as glowery) has not given up his quest for revenge and discovers a cache of historic weapons beneath the Arctic ice (“Thank God for world warming!”), together with a sonic submarine and a magic trident containing the spirit of an undead Atlantean warlord (Recreation Of Thrones’ Pilou Asbæk, sounds bored). Pissed off and newly possessed, Manta launches a bafflingly profitable assault on Atlantis’ capital, forcing King Arthur to interrupt his megalomaniacal half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson, now eats cockroaches) out of fish jail to assist fend off the brand new menace.

As soon as the pair have buried the trident by way of a gaggle hug with mum Queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), we’re off to the races and the movie begins to hit its stride. Conceived from the outset as a buddy comedy, this sees Momoa double down on his loveable-fratboy routine, whereas Wilson’s straight man eyerolls his disapproval. The aquatic duo’s odd-couple bickering delivers the story’s most straight-up fulfilling moments, the movie at its strongest when embracing its foolish aspect.

Sadly, there’s simply not sufficient of that. Returning screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick’s follow-up is a muddled mix of eco fable (Manta is trying to speed up world warming by burning Atlantean tremendous gasoline) and half-baked revenge saga, all tied up with dialogue so leaden it sinks like a 50-pound anchor (“I used to be going to kill you final, however thanks for dropping by!” declares the bug-eyed antagonist). The place the primary movie married its unabashedly dappy tone with a Technicolor sensory assault that noticed director James Wan throw so many disparate concepts on the display you have been swept away by the sheer batshit audacity of all of it, this follow-up appears positively restrained, shedding a lot of its attraction within the course of.

Certain, the drumming cephalopod returns, now promoted to full-blown sidekick standing (TOPO – Tactical Operations And Pursuit Octopus), and we do get to witness Nicole Kidman trip a robotic shark, however a lot of the remainder (large grasshoppers on a Cranium-Island-like misplaced continent, zombie fish-men in a sunken metropolis) feels wearyingly spinoff. Even Wan’s occasional forays into horror territory don’t go far sufficient to have a lot impression. It doesn’t assist that, in a deeply cynical try to seize a few of Avatar: The Approach Of Water’s sunken treasure, the entire affair arrives in lacklustre and completely pointless 3D. Nor that it ends, like so a lot of its predecessors, in a relentless onslaught of brain-numbing CGI that proves extra headache-inducing than awe-inspiring.