Let’s just get this out of the way: Shazam!, the latest stand-alone origin story from DC Comics is better than Aquaman — but sadly, that ain’t saying much.
There are small chunks of Shazam! that work really well, and provide the kind of visceral thrill that such superhero movies should evoke, but overall, in terms of delivering a movie that soars from beginning to end, DC Comics is still batting well below .300.
So what's the quintessential difference between the films of DC and those of the Marvel Comics Universe? Execution.
To date, Marvel has made 21 films that form a cohesive, long-form narrative. Each character introduced so far represents a critical piece of the puzzle, which up to this point has guided all of the heroes toward their climactic encounter with Thanos.
Since 2011’s Green Lantern, DC Comics has delivered seven films that represent a mix of origin stories and shared-universe adventures, yet they lack a unifying theme or core objective.
Shazam! is the eighth DC film, and it’s wholly different than anything the studio has produced thus far, for better and for worse. Much of Shazam! plays like a family-friendly comedy — trust us when we say the comparisons to Big are warranted — with a bunch of computer-generated fighting thrown in throughout.
It’s fun in fits and spurts, but overall, this is just another origin story of another superhero you may remember from your childhood that doesn’t serve any purpose beyond its two-plus-hours runtime.
Zachary Levi is perfectly suited, excuse the pun, to play the titular hero, who is the adult version of 14-year-old foster kid Billy Batson (Asher Angel), and Angel is just as strong playing the hero as a boy on the cusp of manhood.
Both actors engage incredibly well with Billy’s new best friend, Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), a handicapped youth living at the group home where Batson winds up as the movie opens. In fact, the best parts of Shazam! come when Freddy uses his knowledge of superheroes to help the newly Shazam'ed Billy discover his powers, as they video themselves doing tests for flight, fire resistance, strength and more.
Levi nails the mindset of a teenager, and he exudes childlike wonder and awe with each discovery of a new power. There’s an awesome sequence inside a convenience store that encapsulates the film at its best, along with another brief scene at a bank where Freddy and Shazam try to get a loan to build their own super lair.
Freddy and Shazam also have some wonderful back-and-forth debates when trying to choose a name for Billy’s hero persona, which range from Zap-tain America to Maximum Voltage to Red Cyclone.
“His name is Thunder Crack,” Freddy extolls at one point.
“Dude, that sounds like a butt thing,” Shazam says sheepishly.
The problem with Levi’s performance is that it recalls, at times almost verbatim, the mannerisms and inflections of Tom Hanks’ work in Big. There’s even an unnecessary, direct homage to Big that feels almost like overkill.
But too much of Shazam! is focused on the bad guy, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), whose name is only spoken once, I believe. Sivana is completely one-dimensional, a terribly shallow villain who only wants Shazam’s powers because he’s been possessed by the Seven Deadly Sins that the original, ancient wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) had kept trapped for centuries in his secret cave hideout.
Confused? I was, too.
The Seven Deadly Sins are indistinguishable, CGI monsters meant to represent actual sins, but they come off like dull, gray, lifeless creatures with glowing red eyes. Even more disconcerting, Hounsou is forced to wear probably the worst old-age prosthetics and wig that I’ve ever seen in a big-budget tentpole release, and Strong’s only evil attributes are a glowing blue eye and a scar.
The two big battles between Shazam and Sivana are mostly ho-hum retreads of better, bigger fights you’ve already seen in dozens of other Marvel and DC films, with hardly any “wow” moments to set them apart.
Shazam! dabbles in the kind of subversive counter-approach that made Deadpool such a fresh surprise, albeit with none of the potty-mouthed adult humor, but it never fully commits to that vibe until the closing credits, which find an animated Shazam interacting with and pranking other, better-known DC heroes like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
If director David F. Sandberg, who made his name helming two impressive scary movies (Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation), and writer Henry Gayden had stuck to that template, it would have been a fantastic hook that immediately set Shazam! apart from his contemporaries.
As it is, Shazam! never coalesces to show how one of DC’s oldest heroes might one day grow up to play in the same sandbox as his more iconic comics counterparts, and that's a huge problem for the future of the DC Extended Universe.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Apr 4-11, 2019.