[Review] Shazam! (2019)

We are living in the post-Spiderverse world. The latest animated Spider-man film was incredible, perhaps the most effective of several superhero flicks which prove that the genre can accomplish effective, comedic trope deconstruction whilst also developing a coherent plot driven by empathetic characters, garnished with a unique aesthetic identity. The Incredibles did it. Kick Ass did it. Scott Pilgrim did it. Deadpool… sort of did it, one and a half times. Even Toy Story got somewhere close, albeit without actually being about superheroes or villains.

Now Shazam! has arrived at the party, years too late, friendless and distinctly lacking in supplies of booze, to prove that not all can be sunny in Philadelphia, and to hammer the new superhero blockbuster fashion of self-aware ‘meta-humour’ into the ground so quickly you wouldn’t even have time to say, well, ‘Shazam.’ All semblance of a fresh approach to the genre, whether in regards to action or comedy, has been left behind in 2005 when this movie should have been made, if at all.

Shazam! is a slew of cheap innuendos interspersed with crummy super-fights and — all too rarely — stabs at developing relationships between the hero, Billy, (Asher Angel) and his foster-family. The film is incapable of maintaining a serious tone for more than thirty seconds, which not only mixes with the DC cinematic universe’s commitment to the grimdark aesthetic like orange juice and toothpaste, but is a shame because the chemistry between the Vasquez family is leaps and bounds above any other part of the film. Sometimes this chemistry does come from witty one-liners, but mostly it’s thanks to the surprisingly talented child actors that this film is watchable. Even then, they are stifled by a seemingly endless plot revolving around the baddies taking them hostage in order to trap Billy into surrendering his super-powers, through which Billy learns that being a superhero isn’t about posing for photographs — it’s about love and responsibility.

Hands up if you’ve seen this plot before, by the way.

This time, the baddies are living gargoyles with evil red eyes and slimy skin and… and… and that is the extent of their existence. There are seven of them, because they represent the Seven Deadly Sins, though they could be named after the seven dwarves for all I care. They are as abstracted from their origins in Christian mythology as it is possible to be. At one point, Billy taunts the gargoyle of Envy for being the weakest, ugliest of all the Sins, to which it responds by lashing out at him with rage, or ‘wrath,’ one might call it.

So we’d expect, with so little to say for itself in regards to menacing villains or original character development, that Shazam! is at least funny. The answer to that is sort of. There are funny moments, mostly thanks again to the kid actors, though sometimes it’s because the jokes are genuinely funny, such as when Billy and his friend Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) use the former’s new adult superhero appearance to buy beer, only to discover they hate the taste, and we immediately jump cut to a shot of them exiting the store for a second time with arms full of energy drinks and chips. The funniest moment, without exaggeration, was when Billy came face to face with the evil Dr. Sivana, played by Mark Strong, who harnesses the power of the Seven Ugly Sins in order to… well, actually, that’s never explained, though naturally we assume it’s not very pleasant. Anyway, at one point Sivana slammed Billy into the ground violently and, for a few seconds, the screen went dark. A little girl in the audience shouted a delayed but emphatic “No!” in response. It was hysterical. A five year old had better comedic timing than this film and she probably didn’t even know it.

Oh, no, no, Mark. You don’t get off with just a name-drop in this cataclysmic vacuum of creativity.

Mark Strong, the film’s greatest asset on paper, is unbearably generic. He is consistently wooden and boring, upstaged by literal children. I wouldn’t call what he gave ‘a performance.’ His character motivations, to which I naturally attribute him no blame, include power-lust and more power-lust, tinged with Daddy-issues stemming from the verbal abuses of a father who is as cartoonishly evil as he is. (Sorry, I shouldn’t use the ‘c’ word — after all, at the risk of sounding like a broken record myself, Spider-verse blew this film and every other superhero film out of the water.)

Nonetheless, Strong fills the shoes of his bland character admirably, refusing to do a single piece of acting in 132 minutes. His magic ‘Look-I’m-the-Bad-Guy’ eye tells far more about his character than he does. Mark Strong, everybody— you may remember him from films such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Imitation Game. Pray you do not. You will only be disappointed.

Look on the bright side. I couldn’t see Zachary Levi as a real human being in this film, but rather a half-flesh, half-action figure avatar controlled by a 14 year old boy, which is of course the entire point. To ask an actor to convey a character is one thing — to ask them to play someone else playing a different character, who is trapped in a body which is not their own, is another, and Levi does it very well. The child and teen actors likewise give versatile and emotive performances — Jack Dylan Grazer perhaps steals the show by a hair.

And that, I’m afraid, is it for the positives, though I really can’t understate how good Levi, Grazer, Angel, etc are. The first half of the film, in which Billy and Freddie find a number of humorous approaches to testing the water of Billy’s newfound superpowers, is actually a fun watch for the most part, even if the jokes don’t all land (the fault of the writers, not the actors). But a first half doesn’t make a film — and even if it did, there are just too many other, better iterations of similar ideas to make this film worth watching.

Scope and story: 0/3.

Performance and production: ⚡⚡/3.

(Superhero exclusive) Shazam factor: ⚡/3.