Aquaman

(M) ★★½

Director: James Wan.

Cast: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Dolph Lundgren, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Kidman, Graham McTavish.

The new Pantene ads were off the hook.

DC Comic's Extended Universe is six films strong. No other big-budget franchise could have survived for six films delivering this level of quality - across the sextet, there is only one genuinely great entry (Wonder Woman) and five that range from terrible to okay.

And if there was one film to sum up the hit-and-mostly-miss nature of the DCEU, it's Aquaman. It perfectly embodies what is wrong and right with the franchise. Its script is a toneless mess filled with lengthy stretches of horrible dialogue, but it has enough high points to make you wonder if the next film is the one where the DC brains trust will finally gets its collective shit together.

It does manage to make its fish-summoning hero awesome though. Aquaman AKA Arthur Curry (Momoa) was introduced briefly in Batman Vs Superman and played a pivotal role in Justice League, but finally gets centre stage here as the son of a landlubber (Morrison) and an underwater queen (Kidman) who is seen by some as the perfect person to prevent an imminent attack on land by the sea kingdom of Atlantis.

But that means Arthur must visit a marine world he has never known, confront a half-brother (Wilson) hellbent on ruling the oceans and conquering the land, and claim a throne he's not that interested in claiming.

For much of its runtime, Aquaman is frustratingly unsubtle. It's the epitome of dumb screenwriting, partly painted into a corner by having already introduced the character yet trying to tell his origin story without actually telling his origin story, but also struggling under the weight of its mythology and its quest to find the right tone.

When it can turn off the exposition and turn up the explosions, Aquaman is one of the most visually impressive blockbuster spectacles in a long time. Its underwater world looks incredible, but even better are the CG effects used to make it a believable world. The work that has gone into creating a fully realised oceanic environment with its own set of enhanced-yet-natural-seeming physics is astounding. By the time we get to the final battle, much of the script's idiocy has been left for dead in a wave of stunning visuals.

But it's an often-painful journey to get to that point, largely thanks to the script. There are other factors though. In the first act, Morrison and Kidman have less chemistry than an arts school, and the CG de-ageing effect used on Morrison doesn't quite stick. But that's nothing compared to the truly turgid dialogue between Jesse Kane (Michael Beach) and his son David Kane AKA Black Manta (Abdul-Mateen II), which seems to have been dropped in from a shitty Steven Seagal movie. Aquaman also handles its flashbacks badly, despite the best efforts of Dafoe, whose character Vulko serves as part-Mr Miyagi/part-Mr Exposition.

There is also a real sense of "we don't know what this film is exactly", with the vibe shifting from scene to scene. It has echoes of an underwater Thor, which is probably where its tone should have sat, but it wanders off into Tomb Raider territory, and even has some horror elements. It can't quite nail its sense of humour either, which is at its worst when it actually turns Arthur into a squealing wimp at one stage. And any film that goes out of its way to look like a computer game on occasion is a worry.

Momoa is mostly good, and if nothing else he and this film have achieved their goal of making Aquaman a cool-as-fuck bad-ass, effectively killing off while simultaneously embracing the punchline about a superhero who talks to fish. Wilson gives an earnest and solid turn as the film's 'big bad' Orm AKA Ocean Master, and Lundgren seems to have hit a purple patch thanks to this and Creed II. Heard is patchy as Mera, while Kidman's performance is strangely the worst of the film.

But, as seems to be the usual now, DC have fumbled. The script is dire despite the story being okay, which makes whole stretches of the film cringe-inducing, and it continues to struggle with finding a balance between its moments of light and shade.

Admittedly, this was a tough play to make, and in some ways Aquaman is a success - its effects are off-the-charts, its action sequences are predominantly awesome, and it has succeeded in making its hero truly super and less joke-worthy.

But finding a second great film for the DCEU continues to be a white whale the comics company can't land.