Momoa and Wilson bicker their way across a jungle like a decent buddy comedy, and the film keeps interrupting them with its plot. Everything around them is loud, soft-edged and hard to follow, and it ends on a shrug.
James Wan’s second Aquaman opens with Arthur (Jason Momoa) telling us in voiceover that he is now King of Atlantis and a father, and that he prefers the second job. He divides his week between a council chamber where he is politely ignored and a lighthouse where his father Tom (Temuera Morrison) does the night feeds. Meanwhile Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is combing the seabed with Dr Shin (Randall Park) for Atlantean salvage, and finds a black trident that talks to him. It introduces him to a lost kingdom, its king Kordax (Pilou Asbæk) and a fuel that warms the planet as it burns. Arthur, needing help, breaks his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) out of a desert prison. That is the first act, and it is the last stretch of the film in which we always knew what was happening.
It is not the wreck the harshest reviews describe, and it is not much of a film either. What it has is the brothers. Momoa plays Arthur as a man who gave up on dignity some time ago, and Wilson, who spent the first film sneering, plays Orm as a fastidious prince appalled by everything above the waterline. The middle hour, in which the two of them cross a jungle island, argue about who betrayed whom and eat things they should not, is the only part of the picture that seems to have been written with actors in mind. David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick’s script gives them half a dozen decent exchanges, and Kirk M. Morri, who elsewhere cuts as though paid by the shot, lets these scenes breathe.
We laughed properly at Wilson’s face when Arthur hands him a cockroach and calls it a land shrimp. About a minute later we realised we had not laughed at anything else for forty minutes, and the reason is not hard to find. Everything that is not two men talking has been handed to a computer, and the computer is having a bad day.
Don Burgess shoots Atlantis through so much digital water that faces go soft and the edges of things go furry, and there are underwater brawls in which we could not tell which of three identical armoured figures was ours. Nicole Kidman rides a motorised shark, and the film seems to think that is enough. Bill Brzeski’s production design has ideas, a rusted kingdom on the seabed and an island where the plants bite, and none of them is held still long enough to be looked at. Richard Sale’s one clear success is Manta’s helmet, a black dome with two red eyes, which reads cleanly in every shot.
Abdul-Mateen II is asked to be furious for two hours and does it, but the script gives him the same grievance he had last time and then lets a possessed trident do his thinking. Park’s reluctant scientist is the nearest thing to a human being on Manta’s side and is given almost nothing to do about it. Amber Heard’s Mera is in the film less than her billing suggests, and Dolph Lundgren’s Nereus gets a throne and a frown. The planet-warming plot arrives with a montage of news bulletins and is set aside whenever there is something to punch. Rupert Gregson-Williams’s score runs at one volume from the first frame to the last.
Wan made the first Aquaman in 2018 with an obvious pleasure in colour and a willingness to let a strange image sit on screen. He also made The Conjuring and Furious 7, so he knows how to hold a shot and how to stage a chase. Here he is hurrying. Set pieces begin before we know where anyone is standing and end before we know what has been won.
The second half heads for the kingdom of the title and takes turns we will not describe, though anyone who has seen three of these will guess the shape. At 124 minutes it is shorter than most of its rivals and still feels padded. Most critics have landed a little below us, and we understand why; we have added a few points for the brothers. Watch it with the lights off and the brightness up. That is not a joke about the film. It is a practical note about the water.
