Kritiken

Winningly goofy but blemished by behind-the-scenes tinkering, The Lost Kingdom is disappointing in the usual sequel way: It rearranges without deepening the elements people liked about its predecessor... Still, there’s something almost noble about the film refusing to devote even a single second to the business of resetting a franchise. The second Aquaman, like the first, is true to itself: a chintzy blast of machismo every bit as disinterested in regime change as its bulky hero is.

Where Aquaman felt original, Lost Kingdom is stale, void of all originality... [The film] lacks imagination and delight, which is what made the first film a blast. The sharp wackiness has been sucked dry... There are brief echoes of the first film’s zany antics... but the film zooms by so fast that [characters are] literally sprinting to keep up with the plot.

[A] shoddy, scraped-from-the-bottom-of-an-ocean-trench sequel... The lazily generic plot devices... performances so thuddingly clunky that much of the dialogue sinks like a boulder in the sea; the lack of any humour whatsoever: these are all minor irritations compared with the picture’s glib trivialisation of the climate crisis. Time to put a barnacle in it, fish boy.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a minimum viable product, plopped into the theater with an apathy as pervasive and all-encompassing as the ocean itself... Aquaman 2’s job is to simply exist—the last cynical hope of squeezing a few nickels out of the unsalvageable mess that is Warner Bros.’s last decade of superhero movies.

In some important ways, [Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom] laps the original. In others, it — and its mega-franchise — seem destined to sink without a ripple... [The film] may not be consequential in the long run, but it’s a mostly diverting, upbeat closer, one that could hint at the tone of things to come.

the team behind Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom isn’t afraid of doing what’s expected. They seem to prefer it... [The film] is frustratingly committed to formula... [and its script] moves between clunky exposition laying out more Atlantis lore and a string of punchlines in search of a joke.

“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” is less lyrical and wonderstruck, more battle-ready than “Aquaman” was... The movie, with all that combat, is staged on an impressively grand scale by the returning director, James Wan, but at the same time there’s something glumly standard about it.

“Lost Kingdom” is being released in theaters as the product of a conglomerate that didn’t exist when production began, and under the banner of a newly formed studio that didn’t have any use for it by the time production ended... The macro-narrative purposelessness of this movie’s production seems to have seeped into the water at some point along the way, as this floundering sequel lacks the sense of discovery and depth of vision that made the previous “Aquaman” so much fun

[Much of The Lost Kingdom] feels wearyingly derivative. Even Wan’s occasional forays into horror territory don’t go far enough to have much impact. It doesn't help that [the film] ends, like so many of its predecessors, in a relentless onslaught of brain-numbing CGI that proves more headache-inducing than awe-inspiring.

Where the first Aquaman movie was in enough trouble, with Jason Momoa smirking his way through the story of Aquaman’s undersea travails as if guesting on a lager ad, now we have a terrible sequel... The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

The new Aquaman closes out the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) not with a whimper but a bang. Okay, that is too strong of an endorsement, as The Lost Kingdom is not exactly a good film. But it isn’t a bad one, either. At least not on the level of atrociousness that DC delivered earlier this year with the execrable double hit of Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Flash.

Momoa is the best reason to see [The Lost Kingdom]. He's as alpha-cool, even jerk-ish, as a "maverick" action star can be while also making you believe his character is fundamentally decent and knows when he's gone too far and sincerely feels bad about it... And it all works. The self-awareness never becomes self-conscious or off-putting. Rather than give viewers emotional whiplash, Momoa leads them on to the next scene (or mode) in a way that makes it feel as if it's all of a piece.