Aquaman flounders in The Lost Kingdom

polygon.com:

It was around the third time Jason Momoa was wiping piss off his face that I felt truly unmoored from Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

I was all in on the original Aquaman, even putting it in my top 10 of 2018, but to see MY MAN not once, not twice, but thrice wipe excreta off his face and hold for laughs sent me spiraling. I’m not even sure if the liquid that Topo the octopus squirts from his underside onto Momoa’s Arthur Curry during their Sahara desert adventure is piss, exactly, but it conjured horrors from earlier in the movie, when a small baby pee-pees on his Aquadaddy’s face, and mom Mera (Amber Heard) uses her waterbending abilities to really just soak his ass. I’m not anti-piss joke, but in the grand scheme of a DC comic book adventure, three feels a bit cheap. For a movie that likely cost the GDP of a small nation to produce, the whole thing feels that cheap.

The Lost Kingdom picks back up with Arthur after the upheaval in Atlantis that left his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), aka Ocean Master, imprisoned and the DC hero wearing the crown of the underwater kingdom. In an opening prologue faithfully adapted from Thor: Love and Thunder, Arthur catches the audience up on his life juggling parental and political duties, and how he’s drowning in them both. At one point, while crushing a few cans of Guinness (a product placement motif in the film), Arthur salutes his old man, played once again by Temuera Morrison, for raising a son all by himself: “To single dads!” The blunt-but-sweet moment is the last trace of character in The Lost Kingdom, which reduces Momoa’s original rambunctious, rough-around-the-edges rogue down to a mugging one-liner machine who makes Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban references.