Dampen your enthusiasm

Rating: 5/10 (18 December 2018)

I'm at a bit of a quandary about how to review "Aquaman" here. It's not good, that's fair to say but I've a strange feeling it's about as good as its ridiculous source material would allow it to be.
Jason Momoa is Arthur Curry. Hilariously he's supposed to be 29 years old. He's also the son of Atlanna, fleeing queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman) and Tom, a lighthouse keeper, played (in unconvincing de-aging CGI by Temurea Morrison). His half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) threatens to unite the undersea kingdoms and wage war on the land dwellers, so Arthur returns home to challenge his brother for control of the undersea realms.
So, whilst it's not really acting as such, Jason Momoa is always watchable and his charisma will carry you through quite a distance. The film also has a few decent action sequences along the way, particularly the underwater battle that concludes it and the opening fight scene on board a submarine. That's about it for the positives though.
On dozens of occasions, "Aquaman" is laugh out loud hilariously awful. The plot is terrible, a clichÃ© ridden McGuffin hunt, a painfully obvious twist towards the end and some awful foreshadowing plot points. It has, noticeably, terrible music choices throughout - a horrible score of pretend wonder. The rest of the performances apart from Momoa are dreadful, particularly Willem Defoe and Dolph Lundgren but nobody else comes off particularly well. It's the script though, that should have been drowned. From "This was your grandfathers knife, he was a frogman in World War 2, then they turned their back on him" onwards it's a terrible collection of recycled everything you've heard before in action movies for the last thirty years. It's painfully unaware how unfunny it is too.
The CGI is patchy, happier with real creatures and vehicles than it is with fictional characters. It often ignores its own internal logic too, at one point Curry hangs onto to a building to avoid a ten foot drop - but before and after that he happily falls hundreds of feet and shrugs it off. Conventional weapons can't damage Curry, until towards the end, where one can. Nobody runs away when a shark starts to crack an aquarium wall.
Sadly, I'm not convinced there is a better "Aquaman" movie possible than this one but I'm not sure that's any reason to pretend this one is any good.