New Line Cinema. 2019. Superhero. 132 minutes.
In this, Hollywood’s Year of Our Lord 11 AIM (11 years After Iron Man), it is fruitless to wonder how long this current cinematic superhero onslaught will continue. A character database search on Marvel’s website lists 2562 characters. DCComics.com lists a modest, and certainly incomplete, 168. Either way, we’re guaranteed of being force-fed superhero product for the remainder of our natural lives or until Disney buys every remaining studio, then buys itself, causing the destruction of all life in the universe.
In the meantime, this year we’ve already been treated to Captain Marvel, the first Marvel film top-lined by a superheroine, a worthy and overdue achievement, but a film I found to be overpraised. Stripped of its wokeness and taken merely as storytelling, it’s really a second-tier, time-killing undercard to the main event, Avengers: Endgame. Regarding that little indie nugget, if it weren’t for its reported 3-hour running time, Avengers: Endgame would, if my math is correct, make more money than has ever been printed by every country in the history of everything. And despite reports, there is no truth to the rumor that Disney, mad with power following its $71B purchase of 21st Century Fox, has arranged to slow down Earth’s rotation during the film’s theatrical run to allow for more daytime showings.
Point being, in the age of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and the DCEU (DC Extended Universe), no superhero character can exist on his or her own, they must serve a greater corporate good by fitting into an overall cinematic and release-calendar puzzle. I eagerly await the definitive telling of how Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige managed to so masterfully build out an interconnected world that has resulted in 21 polished and entertaining films in only 11 years. Deciding who gets introduced in a standalone film and who gets introduced in an Avengers film and then spun off into a standalone film could not have been easily plotted. Then there’s DC. In terms of universe building, they’re playing Candyland to Marvel’s Monopoly. Their cinematic universe has struggled to gain the same foothold in the public consciousness, mainly because their films are so dark it’s hard to know where to place your foot. Whereas the Marvel films have the cannily ability to move left at the very moment we’ve gotten tired of going right (just when the films were getting too serious, here comes AntMan!), DC has only succeeded in the rare individual film that shocked us all by not sucking as much as the previous film.
Zack Snyder’s DCU-launching Batman and Superman films were joyless black holes of despair and common matriarchal first names. It took the standalone Wonder Woman film, with its sincerity, spirit and decency, to give the DC overlords at Warner Bros. any hope. Aquaman is fairly awful but was saved by its sense of Flash Gordon-esque high camp and the nonstop, giddy surprise of its psychedelic visuals.
So what then should we make of Shazam! Where does a sullen 14-year old foster child who can’t believe he’s a freakin’ superhero fit in the DC Extended Universe? The answer is, who cares, just be glad he’s here. Its achievement, though, is more a function of what it isn’t than what it is. It’s not a deadly wallow in self-seriousness and it’s not a chore to sit through. Shazam is not an inflated Christ figure like Snyder’s Superman and he’s not filled with existential angst like Batman. But like Bruce Wayne, Shazam’s alter ego also has parental issues. Philadelphia teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) was abandoned by his mother and sent to various foster homes from which he’s always managed to run away. His newest home contains two loving, dorky foster parents (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans, well-played) and five foster kids including adorable scamp Darla (Faithe Herman) and, most crucially, superhero-admiring, motor-mouthed, handicapped teen Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer).
Under normal cinematic circumstances, Billy landing in the most blue-state, multi-culti foster home in North America would feel like the Disney Channel as its laziest. But this is new territory for a superhero film and it feels warm and pleasant here. Billy and Freddie’s relationship grows to become arguably the most fully-realized and relatable friendship of any superhero film. And heroically, screenwriter Henry Gayden never explains Freddie’s handicap, although its main purpose, to add strain to his relationship with Billy later in the film, scores some too-easy emotional points.
After protecting Freddie from two bullies, Billy is magically transported to a cave where an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounsou, looking unsure why he’s there, but making the best of it) decides he is the “one soul who is worthy” of inheriting his powers and turning into an adult superhero whenever he says the word, “Shazam.” The inevitable sequence where the new hero discovers his abilities has occasionally been conveyed with a sense of unbridled joy (if memory serves, one of the 612 Spider-Man movies showed Peter Parker’s thrill in being able to swing around Manhattan) but never with such humor and a passing nod towards realistic teenage behavior. What 14-year old with an adult’s body wouldn’t try to buy “your finest beer” and hit up a strip club? And I, for one, prefer Freddie’s suggestion for Billy’s superhero sobriquet: Captain Sparklefingers. These winning scenes of discovery also reveal the movie’s true superpower (other than its reliance on Penny Marshall’s Big): the almost-famous comic actor Zachary Levi. Bulked up to an impossible degree and wearing a red and white costume that falls somewhere between circus clown and toreador, Levi is funny, charming and not snarky, a blow-dried and lantern-jawed embodiment of teenage wish fulfillment.
If the film didn’t have too many other responsibilities, it would have benefited from a bit more insight regarding its very au courant theme: non-traditional families can be as loving and nurturing as any other type of family (Logan had a notable take on this). Indeed, the one major character with a “traditional” father and brother winds up being the supervillian. Thaddeus Sivana (played, as an adult, by reliable if generic Mark Strong) was bullied by his family as a child and rejected by the wizard for being too tempted by evil. He has spent his life trying to find a way back to the wizard’s cave and when he does, he becomes master of the Seven Deadly Sins and uses his power to insure the film gets a PG-13.
Although Shazam and Sivana have, intriguingly, more in common then they think, the movie still lapses into autopilot during their confrontations. A final battle at a carnival, where Billy must embrace the adult responsibilities that come with his powers while acknowledging the importance of family, lasts forever and shows how much the film needed its humor and its central relationship to set it apart. There are moments when I wish Shazam! would have really given us something deeply emotional or truly irreverent. Deadpool 2 made me laugh harder than any film since the first Deadpool, not only for the machine gun raunch of its humor but because it felt like, for two shining hours, Marvel let the inmates run the asylum and the freedom was liberating. Shazam! is not this risky. It just feels like it is. It’s directed with an almost ’80s looseness (one might argue blandness) by David F. Sandberg. There’s not much big-budget polish here, perhaps because Sandberg doesn’t have it to give, emerging as he did from low-budget horror, with hits like Annabelle: Creation. He and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (The Nun, Maniac and two features with Sandberg) keep things very dark; the inside of Billy and Freddie’s foster home is lit like the inside of the Corleone mansion. A confrontation in a corporate boardroom was surprisingly intense and most of the action scenes are at night, with the notable and welcome exception of Shazam’s first encounter with Thaddius after our hero saves a busload of civilians. So from a visual standpoint, Shazam! does rest within DC’s established universe.
The question now is, can Captain Sparklefingers stand comfortably next to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in some far-off but inevitable DC team-up film? A fleeting shot at the film’s conclusion suggests the possibility. In the meantime, had Shazam! been given the green light to forgo world-building and genre considerations to concentrate harder on its strengths, it would have been something very special instead of just very refreshing.