Aquaman's funny and fun superhero can do little to rescue a laboured movie

Jason Momoa as a professional swimmer would be a calamity. He’s too, too big. And while the strapping frame is mighty, it won’t quite allow him to string together three consecutive strokes in the pool. None of that, of course, matters in the DC universe, where Momoa is the tattoo-clad, bare-chested Aquaman, the amphibious superhero who is out to save the world from underwater royalty whose preferred mode of travel are neon seahorses. And for the record, it’s pronounced “Aa-qua-man”.

Momoa is not new to the superhero game; he previously turned out in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016) and Justice League (2017), all brisk, striking performances. In James Wan’s (Insidious and The Conjuring) Aquaman, Momoa is out on his own for the first time; the absence of a cape is well compensated for by swag.

The story here is fairly straightforward: Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), the prospective queen of the undersea empire Atlantis, is found washed up on shore and is rescued by a lighthouse keeper called Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison). The two fall in love and Atlanna gives birth to a son, Arthur, but is soon asked to return home by the king’s men. She eventually ends up marrying the king and conceives another son, Orm (Patrick Wilson). Several years later, Orm is king and out to wreak havoc against his mongrel half-brother and the rest of the surface world.  

There is very little to not like about Momoa as Aquaman. He is funny, terrific at his job, drinks like a fish and even hangs out with them. Amber Heard as Aquaman’s affable badass sidekick, Princess Mera, offers some of the more enjoyable moments in the film but never quite fully grows into her character. Matters are made worse by a stolid gaze that remains unchanged almost throughout the film. Much-needed gravitas in this reckless AquaLoop is provided by Kidman.

As for Wan’s direction, Aquaman is filled with stupefying underwater visual effects and some wonderfully acrobatic camerawork. The escapes — and there are a lot of them — make for compelling viewing. The highlights include a flare-lit dive into the ocean and a scenic rooftop confrontation in Sicily of all places. But the film starts soon starts to sink (had to throw in an ocean pun) on the back of a painfully slow narrative. Walls around Mamoa explode far too often and the same fight sequences ensue: Aquaman gets clobbered but always strikes back. What’s more, the unusually long screen time ensures that Aquaman soon starts resembling an underwater video game — the realism of it all gets deluged by a laboured plot. It’s almost like staring at a giant, garish fish tank.

Moreover, superhero films are almost always driven by enigmatic villains desperate to better the enemy. Here, the villainy is unbelievably middling. Wilson, who plays the chief antagonist, turns in a staid performance that would strike fear into no one, let alone someone with the pedigree and potency of Aquaman. Wan also hugely underutilises Willem Dafoe, who plays Nuidis Vulko, the Atlantis counselor who is mentor to Arthur.

In fact, all characters, Mamoa’s included, lack depth or nuance — you watch them all battle, but know actually very little about them. Aquaman himself does not believe in emotional vulnerability and grapples with only others and not himself — another of those familiar superhero-movie tropes that Wan doesn’t seem too interested to underscore.

Delirious superhero enthusiasts will invariably invest their time here, but a true yardstick of Aquaman’s success will only arrive in the form of how many non-fans end up watching it. Given that it barely manages to stay afloat, I seriously doubt that that number will be incredibly high. You, too, should stay away — the water is too dangerous this time.