Shazam!

SHAZAM!

This is usually the part where I open up with a bit of backstory about the film I am currently reviewing – for the record, it’s Shazam!, in case you didn’t read the title for some reason. But I actually kind of already touched upon it in my review for Captain Marvel, which you can find a few posts back if you’re reading this on my blog, or you can find on my Letterboxd account (here and here). Now, the nice part of this is we can just jump right into the movie. So, let’s do that, shall we?

In the city of Philadelphia, a young boy named Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is trying to find his mother, from whom he was separated at a very young age. However, he is put in a foster home that is occupied by five other kids, one of them being a superhero geek named Freddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), who Billy quickly befriends. But once a man named Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong) gains magical abilities that threaten the world, an old wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) summons Billy and gives him his powers and mantle, turning him into a super-strong superhero (Zachary Levi). Billy/Shazam asks Freddie to help him gain control of his supernatural abilities. So, they do all the crazy things any kid would do with superpowers: goof around. But Billy/Shazam will need to grow out of that if he wants to take down the evil Dr. Sivana.

The #1 thing to keep in mind when going into this film is that there is no major big theme going down aside from family, which the Guardians of the Galaxy movies kind of already covered, and some other themes about foster homes and having a handicap that aren’t trotted out too much in the superhero genre, but have been handled in other films slightly better. But this is not a criticism against the movie; far from it. I feel like a lot of our modern-day superhero films have tried so hard to be weighty philosophical treatises on certain things that we forget the key important element that got us all into superheroes as kids: fun. And this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had at a superhero movie in quite a while; think Ant-Man for a suitable measure. The amount of pure joy that comes from this film is so contagious that by the hour-mark, you’re either gonna be onboard or not, and I was completely onboard. In fact, it kind of feels like director David F. Sandberg – who does bring some of his horror chops with him to this film, fair warning - wanted to make a throwback to those old 80s/90s kids movies, and it really shows in all the best ways.

And most of this has to do with the cast they’ve assembled. Angel Asher gives great gravitas and snarkiness as Billy while Zachary Levi feels like he was born to play this role. Jack Dylan Grazer is right at home as the nerdy, sympathetic Freddie, and the rest of the kids are very well rounded and feature into the plot much more than the advertising showed. The rest of the cast are fine and get the job done, since the main focus of the film is Billy/Shazam and Freddie and their friendship. Benjamin Wallfisch's score is a standout as well, being a throwback to those old traditional superhero scores with the triumphant brass section backed up by a lively string melody. 

I only have two major gripes with the movie. One is the villain. Don’t get me wrong, Mark Strong does a great job with what he’s given, but he’s not really given much to do. He just comes across as a stereotypical bad guy. They try to give him a tragic backstory, but throughout the rest of the movie, he doesn’t really act in a way that would garner my sympathy. And I would be fine with this if he were more entertaining, but he feels kind of like Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy, in that he only kind of exists to contrast the hero’s goofiness with his comedic seriousness. The second is that the climax goes on a little longer than I would have liked. At first, it gets really fun in a way which I WILL NOT SPOIL AND YOU SHOULDN’T EITHER! But then it just kind of goes on and on and you sort of start looking at your watch saying, “How long is this movie again?”

However, those gripes don’t hinder my enjoyment of this film in the slightest. This is probably the best film that the DCEU has produced since Wonder Woman, and it’s probably their most optimistic and fun film. Definitely get out and see it with your kids, though I would be cautious since, as mentioned before, there are some horror bits in the film that might upset them. So, be careful, unless you believe in the Don Bluth edict: you can show a child anything as long as you attach a happy ending to it.