Contractual obligations: the movie.

Four years after defeating King Orm (Patrick Wilson) and Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), Arthur “the Aquaman” Curry (Jason Momoa) has settled into a dual life, splitting his time between being King of Atlantis and raising his infant son at his father’s (Temuera Morrison) seaside lighthouse. Meanwhile, Atlantis-obsessed Dr. Shin (Randall Park) has been helping Manta search for Altantian technology to repair his power armor… accidentally stumbling upon a lost kingdom hidden in ice. In addition to finding his sought-after tech, Manta discovers the pieces of a black trident, promising untold power to destroy his enemies for the small price of freeing a dark army. When global catastrophes affecting the planet (again) point to Manta’s plan, Aquaman will need the help of the brother he imprisoned to defeat the Deadmen of Dunharrow, cursed by Isildur to not find rest until they’ve fulfilled their oath of allegiance to fight against Sauron…

Writer/director/producer James Wan does it all, making the invention of new film franchises appear as easy as breathing. Like this past summer’s movie The Flash, however, the franchise informally dubbed “the DC Murder-Verse” has been drawing to a close with reboots on the horizon under new leadership. Aquaman and the Last Kingdom is the final FINAL remnant of Zack Snyder’s darker vision for DC superheroes, now entirely disconnected from the whole (without explanation) into a stand-alone world where supermen, batmen, and wonder women can’t arrive to save the day. Duplicating the cast from the 2018 Aquaman film with MCU alumni Randall Park getting a bigger part, the marketing synopsis is playing it as safe as possible with phrasing like “This time” instead of “In a world…!” The first Jason Momoa film raked in $1.1 billion to become the highest DC film to date, so counting the motorcycle-riding, cheeseburger-eating, Guinness-swigging superhero out would be a mistake. With nothing guarantied for his character going forward and little competition coming soon to a theater near you, will the sequel sink or swim at the holiday box office?

All the fun from the first film feels forced this go around, making it hard to ignore the infinite cycle of pretty new location, talks go sour, fight, repeat. Kudos to the production crew for creating hammerhead subs, squidithopters, and mounted rock-burrowing assassin bugs as original visuals from middle-management studio notes. “Can this be like that Star Wars cantina thing but made out of shipwrecks like in The Little Mermaid?” or “What if we stole every cool James Bond villain lair idea and crammed it into the second act?” and finally “Let’s do a big Lord of the Rings-type battle for a finale!” If LOTR was a trilogy about walking from place to place, Aquaman 2 is a sequel about swimming from place to place, covering presumably thousands of miles of ocean at the speed of plot from one danger-prone digital set piece to another. The only weight given to this sequel is Willem Defoe’s character dying off-screen due to scheduling issues, a story that sounds far better than this borrowed and outright stolen mishmash of a film.

The stakes, like the characters themselves, are generic at best. Nicole Kidman’s Atlanna and Wilson’s Orm are more serious than ever; Momoa’s Arthur is still never serious enough; Manta is even angrier all the time. Amber Heard’s Mera looks as if all of her shots were edited into scenes filmed separately; for being a new wife and mother, she’s unrealistically absent for most of the family-at-home stuff (wink-wink, nudge-nudge). Randall Park’s character appears to have an actual revelation about what was going on at the DCMV: “Young fool, only now, at the end, do you understand.” Fans of Momoa being himself (read: not Aquaman per se) will probably enjoy hearing random bursts of joy from the actor following choreographed stunt work, so expect a supercut of all the ones they had to remove from the film just waiting for the home disc release extras.

Big showy expensive films released in the late December holiday frame have time to do well, especially in 2023 with more than the usual classic films and niche awards contenders as alternatives. The Lost Kingdom is competing solely with the already-popular Godzilla Minus One still expanding onto more screens. With nothing left in the old DC pipeline, now is as good a time as any to also suggest James Gunn offer Jason Momoa the superhero role he was born to play: interstellar bounty hunter Lobo…!

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, some language, and Jabba the Kingfish.

One skull recommendation out of four