Ever since Tim Burton got his hands on the long-awaited reboot of Batman in the 1980s, movies in the DC Comics universe have gone from dark to darkest, and the box office correspondingly has gone down as well. In the meantime, the Marvel Cinematic Universe caught fire with filmgoers, with one blockbuster after another. The difference between the two can best be summed up in one word: humor. Or, in DC’s case, the lack of it. Marvel films aren’t all fun and games, not with half the people on Earth being zapped into oblivion (at least temporarily) in the last Avengers movie, but they’ve always had time to explore the lighter side of a world with superheroes. It took a long time for DC and its studio, Warner Brothers, to figure out this nuance, but Wonder Woman and Aquaman had their moments. And now, the latest DC film, Shazam!, successfully finds the inner child in perhaps the most entertaining DC movie yet.
Of course, it was pretty easy for Shazam! to find its inner child, since that’s the entire premise of the film. The movie can best be summed up in capsule form as a superhero version of Tom Hanks’s Big. Instead of Hank’s character, as a child, magically growing up one day thanks to dropping a coin in a wishing well, Shazam! features 15-year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) being given superpowers by a centuries-old wizard (Djimon Hounsou). The wizard is growing old and weak and needs someone to keep the seven deadly sins in check. The first person he approached, Thaddeus Sivana, turned out to be too power hungry, so the wizard waited thirty more years before approaching Billy.
At first glance, Billy would seem to be a most unlikely choice to be a superhero. He was abandoned by his mother as a young boy and bounced from one foster home to another before winding up, a couple of days earlier, at pretty much his last chance, a family with five other foster children. There, Billy meets one of the other foster children, Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), a crippled boy who is a superhero junkie. Billy and Freddy become friends when Billy helps save his “brother” from schoolyard bullies.
Billy winds up passing the wizard’s test and discovers that by saying the wizard’s name, “Shazam,” out loud, he can transform himself into a bulked-up 30-year-old in a red superhero suit, and, by repeating it, change back to himself. Once he tells Freddy about his new powers, the boys start experimenting to discover the full extent of Billy’s newfound powers. That attracts local media attention and also attracts the attention of the now-adult Sivana (Mark Strong), who has managed to discover the wizard’s secret lair, gain his own superpowers and unleash the seven deadly sins (some of whom look like gargoyles and others like the creatures in the Mucinex commercials) to do his bidding.
Sivana, being greedy as all supervillains are, wants Shazam’s powers, so he calls Billy out, for a fight, not knowing who the boy really is. Sivana can handle his powers better than Billy can, and gets the better of the youngster, but Billy is able to escape by transforming back to his teen self. However, Sivana soon figures out just who Billy is and takes his entire foster family hostage, demanding that Billy give up his powers to save them.
The reason that Big was so successful was that Tom Hanks, even though he was 32 at the time he starred in the film, had a completely believable, wide-eyed, credulous look on his face so that he actually resembled a child in an adult’s body. Zachary Levi has that same innocence about his, and he and young Asher Angel have the same mannerisms as well. So, most of the time, the adult Shazam looks like he’s in the world’s biggest toy store, egged on by his foster brother Freddy, who manages to serve as the film’s obligatory superhero information source and to do so without disrupting the flow of the film.
Admittedly, Shazam! isn’t always internally consistent in the manner in which Billy is portrayed. At times, he behaves like a typical teenager, looking for fame and a good time instead of serving the world, and he makes dumb impetuous mistakes. But, at other times, during his lengthy, climactic battle with Sivana, Billy shows s surprising degree of maturity and a knowledge of psychology, as he goads the considerably older (and presumably wiser) Sivana into losing his temper and committing foolish blunders. I must note, however, that, even though Billy seems more of an adult in these scenes than the film up until that point would suggest, his outwitting Sivana is one of the more enjoyable moments in the movie.
That lengthy, climactic battle between Billy and Sivana is actually the weakest part of Shazam! This movie was made on a significantly lower budget than what gets spent on most superhero films nowadays. Still, there’s a lot of fighting that takes place all over the city of Philadelphia, as the final encounter between the forces of good and evil turns into what amounts to an extended barroom brawl. And, like most barroom brawls, the action gets repetitive after a while. The “fact” that superheroes, supervillains, and demons can absorb a lot of punishment and keep on going means that the audience gets to witness 15 minutes or so of mayhem that does little except knock down CGI structures of various sorts.
Where Shazam! does soar is in its portrayal of Billy’s relationship with his new family. Most superheroes have secret identities, and film scripts pay lip service to them, but their secret identity personas can be wholly summed up in about one sentence. Shazam! captures the entire arc of Billy’s relationship with his new foster brothers and sisters, all of whom display distinctive personality traits over the movie’s two hours. And, when Billy has an extremely disappointing encounter with his birth mother, it’s a more genuinely emotional scene that you’ll find in most superhero films. The script also shrewdly contrasts Billy’s new family with Sivana’s own somewhat warped childhood when he was constantly bullied and belittled by a domineering father (John Glover).
Billy Batson and Shazam were not DC characters originally (in fact, Shazam was originally called Captain Marvel in the comics, a name that was eventually dropped to avoid an intellectual property dispute with Marvel). Instead, they were developed by rival Fawcett Comics in the 1940s and later sold to DC. The characters weren’t fully integrated into the DC lineup until the last decade. Perhaps that explains why Shazam! doesn’t feel like a DC movie, despite numerous Superman references. What it does feel like is a very well-made family film that derives its emotional appeal legitimately, through careful development of characters who feel real. If a typical 15-year-old somehow did gain superpowers, the result would probably turn out like Shazam! In most comic book origin movies, the origin story is a necessary, albeit dull, evil. Here, Billy’s origin and family are what makes Shazam! really super.
