If you’ve always wanted to see an octopus riding a giant seahorse, then Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the movie for you. Unfortunately, you’ll need to wade through a lot of garish CGI and painfully clunky dialogue to get to it.
With a hokey voiceover, James Wan’s eager-to-please sequel reintroduces Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry, reminding us that he is ‘the king of frickin’ Atlantis’ while revealing he now has a baby and is struggling to balance fatherhood on land with bossing around merpeople in the sea. This setup is scuppered by baddie Black Mantis (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, inflicted with the script’s shoddiest lines), who’s found a magic trident and starts rapidly accelerating global warming.
The Lost Kingdom doesn’t so much end things with a whimper as with an enthusiastic bang that shoots off in the wrong direction
For reasons never made clear, Arthur must free his imprisoned nemesis-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) to help him stop the villain. What follows is mostly a ‘good guy teams up with a bad guy’ buddy movie which, despite some fun bantz between Momoa and Wilson, pales in comparison to the similar dynamics in the Thor movies. At one point, Arthur even calls Orm ‘Loki’.
The last gasp of the now-defunct DC Extended Universe, The Lost Kingdom doesn’t so much end things with a whimper as with an enthusiastic bang that shoots off in the wrong direction – like an expensive back-garden firework that winds up in the neighbours’ pond.
In UK cinemas Dec 21 and in the US Dec 22
