Shazam! Review

I feel quite fortunate to have caught "Shazam!" two weeks before its nationwide release. It was a fantastic experience knowing that I was among the first to see the movie, which now bears the responsibility of me helping spread the word to the rest of world. Or, well, at least to my personal sphere of influence. Truth be told, I did nothing special here to get this opportunity, outside being a little overly obsessed with Facebook. I was sitting in my apartment the weekend before last and saw a post from Fandango advertising that they're holding early screenings for fans on March 23. Fandango is one of those pages where Facebook's algorithms put their posts at the top of my news feed every time they post. Even though I never use Fandango since I don't like that extra convenience fee, I choose not to unfollow them because their content is pretty good on social media. In this case, me following their content paid off in the form of an early "Shazam!" screening because the second I saw that, my roommate and I immediately jumped on it, causing me to use Fandango for the first time in years. And it was totally worth it because "Shazam!" was one of my most anticipated movies of the year and the final product filled me with such a joyful delight.

When it comes to this Marvel vs. DC war that the internet likes to continue to fight over, I generally choose not to participate. I instead like to argue the position that we should learn to all get along and just enjoy a good superhero movie, regardless of who is putting it out. Yeah, sure, when it comes to the MCU vs. the DCEU, the MCU is miles ahead at the moment because they got a much early start and did things the right way from the very beginning, causing Warner Bros. to go in panic mode with DC as they spent their time trying to play this game of catch-up rather than taking notes on HOW Marvel built such a great franchise. I mean, Marvel has done such a good job at this that "Captain Marvel" went completely unfazed by an angry internet mob that tried their best to destroy the movie. Just three weeks in and "Captain Marvel" is on the brink of becoming yet another $1 billion movie for Marvel. How did they pull this off? Well, it's because they've built such a strong franchise that the level of trust among the fans is at an all-time high. Said fans couldn't care less about what the internet has to say. They want to see another movie in their franchise, especially since "Infinity War" clued them in on the idea that "Captain Marvel" is required viewing before "Endgame."

Despite this, I refused to join the bandwagon of DC hate even though DC was failing miserably at the same time that Marvel was going to infinity and beyond. Instead, I was sitting there silently hoping that DC would figure it out. Why? Well, first, as I said before, I'm a fan of superhero movies. I want them to be done right. But second, and most importantly, I've always been more of a DC fan at heart. Characters like Batman and Superman meant so much to me growing up that it pains me to see the modern DCEU completely botch the execution of these great characters and their stories. In fact, when it comes to Marvel, I really didn't have the same childhood experiences with them, outside those 90's Spider-Man cartoons, of course. I'm a long time DC fan, but only a more recent Marvel fan as I really didn't get into Marvel that deep until the modern MCU revolution. So I honestly think me refusing to jump on the DC hate bandwagon is why I've been able to be a lot nicer to the DCEU than some. Their only film that I've truly hated is "Man of Steel." "Justice League" and "Suicide Squad" were a bit disappointing, but not nearly as bad as some people have claimed. And "Batman v. Superman" is a movie that just kinda exists for me. I roll my eyes at it, but I don't passionately hate it.

My patience with DC paid off huge with "Wonder Woman." The moment she stepped on that battlefield after telling Steve Trevor that her fight was to help these people was perhaps one of my all-time favorite moments ever in a superhero movie because that was the moment where it dawned on me that I was watching a classic DC film. The studio had gone through a lot of darkness, both literally and figuratively, but this was the moment where it hit me that proper DC was back. It gave me chills and my inner child was so happy that I was on the verge of crying tears of joy. It's like when you've been watching your favorite sports team play awful for years, but then you suddenly witness a turnaround point where you realize they've figured it out and are good again. Yeah, sure, we then had to deal with "Justice League" a few months later, but I think that was the after effects of the Zack Snyder movement not having completely died away since the production of both movies had overlapped. I was hoping that DC would learn from the success of "Wonder Woman" and use that movie as a springboard moving forward. "Wonder Woman" worked because they weren't focused on building a universe. They just hired Patty Jenkins and allowed her to make a "Wonder Woman" movie.

With "Aquaman" and now "Shazam!," it's rather evident that they have learned from that. Both of those movies have plenty of references to the other characters from the DCEU, especially "Shazam!," but in both cases, DC hired individual directors who would then focus on making their individual movie as good as they could. They hired James Wan to direct "Aquaman," then knowing his experience as a director, they stepped aside and allowed him to work his magic with the world of Atlantis. There was no studio mandates and no pressure to make it tie in perfectly to a Justice League film. His job was simply to make a good movie just like it was Patty Jenkins' job to make a good "Wonder Woman." James Wan succeeded. He made a highly entertaining and rather large "Aquaman" that audiences responded quite well to as it made $334 million domestically, second only to "Wonder Woman" in the DCEU, and also become the first DCEU film to cross $1 billion worldwide, having made a total of $1.15 billion thus far. And now they've done the same thing with "Shazam!" as they pulled a trick from Marvel by hiring a fairly unknown horror director in David F. Sandberg and let him make a "Shazam!" movie.

After that important essay on the DCEU, let's talk about this "Shazam!" movie. In terms of the history of this character, I touched on this briefly in my "Captain Marvel" review as well, but he was first created by Fawcett Comics in 1939, but their name for him was Captain Marvel. He was super popular in the 1940's, but Fawcett stopped publishing in the 1950's because DC had a copyright infringement on them after claiming he was a copy of Superman. DC eventually got the rights to the character and started republishing in 1972, but branded the comics as "Shazam!" to avoid confusion with Marvel's character of Captain Marvel, who was first introduced by Marvel in 1967. I missed this next bit when I previously discussed this, but I just learned in looking it up that, despite DC calling the comics "Shazam!," they didn't actually rename the character until 2011. So for several decades we had a character named Captain Marvel in both Marvel and DC comics. But DC's Captain Marvel is now named Shazam. If any of that is still confusing to you, that's probably a normal reaction, but simply stated, in 2019 Billy Batson from DC is Shazam and Carol Danvers from Marvel is Captain Marvel. It's kinda crazy that both of their movies were released within a month of each other.

Despite me having looked up that history, I actually didn't know much about Shazam the character before going into this movie outside the fact that he was a lot like Superman and was a kid who turned into a superhero by saying the name Shazam. I think that lack of knowledge on my end really helped me love this movie even more because I realized there was a huge magical universe here that was rather fascinating and a deep lore that I was just now being introduced to. As a quick summary, Billy Batson is a young kid who is about 14 years old. He's had all sorts of family issues as he was separated from his mother at a young age and has spent most of his life bouncing around from various foster homes, but never being satisfied by any of them as he's instead put much of his effort into finding his birth mother. After his latest attempt fails, he's put into a new foster home with Victor and Rosa Vasquez as the foster parents. They have five foster kids named Freddy, Mary, Eugene, Pedro and Darla. Despite their best efforts, Billy still has a hard time connecting with them because family has never been his thing. But one day in running away from some bullies, Billy has a bit of a brush with fate as he comes upon an ancient wizard who gives him his powers.

There's a lot of things that make this movie work and I'll get into the major highlights of them here, but the biggest thing that propels this movie forward is not necessarily all the superhero stuff, it's the family element of it. First and foremost, Asher Angel as Billy does an incredible job at portraying this kid who you feel bad for. He's a very broken individual. You can feel the pain deep inside him as all he wants is to be reunited with his mother. Thus a lot of his actions in the movie make sense. Victor and Rosa are perhaps the two best foster parents one could ask for, and both are played brilliantly by Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans respectively. They know what Billy is going through and they're there to help him. But Billy is not willing to accept them. There's a very powerful definition given early on about what home and family truly are, but this is a lesson that Billy needs to learn and he's not very good at learning it. Thus the movie doesn't allow everything to just happen super easily. It opens things up for there to be a lot of character development and growth. In addition to Billy and the foster parents, all of the foster kids are quite different and unique, providing for a fun dynamic. Leading the charge here is among the kids is a disabled superhero enthusiast named Freddy.

The dynamic between Freddy and Billy is what you see advertised heavily in the trailers. When Billy stumbles on these powers that turn him into a superhero, he immediately turns to Freddy since Freddy is the one who knows about all this superhero stuff and thus together, without revealing Billy's identity to anyone else, they help build this character together as they go through all these trials to figure out who Billy is and what his powers are. Enter Zachary Levi as the superhero form of Billy, which is an absolutely perfect casting choice. Zachary Levi himself is more or less a grown-up kid, so I feel it was really easy for him to become this character. He's a 14-year-old superhero who looks like an adult and has no idea how to use his powers. Just like there's a lot of room for character progression with Billy as a troubled kid, there's also a lot of room for growth with him as a new superhero. Shazam is a character who is rather powerful. You can even use the word "broken," if you want because that's often a term used to describe a character who is overpowered. But the idea that he's just a kid who was given powers makes him really interesting as he has no idea how to use them and is thus very irresponsible at times, causing him to be further separate from his foster family.

This creates a lot of problems when our villain shows up. Said villain in this movie is Dr. Sivana. Even though his back story is nothing to write home about, and the movie does spend quite a bit of time on that, Mark Strong's performance was so good that it gave him the sufficient amount of menace for me to buy into him as a villain. There were several scenes with him early on that reminded me that the director of this movie is David F. Sandberg, whose only previous two directorial features before this are "Lights Out" and "Annabelle: Creation," two solidly entertaining horror films that properly set up the horror elements. Sandberg gets the opportunity to do something much different than a horror film with "Shazam!," but that background made for quite the menacing scenes even though the characters motivations are a tad bit cliche. He's a power hungry villain who, for certain reasons that I won't mention, but are thoroughly explored in the film, needs to go through Billy Batson in order to obtain his ultimate goal. The scenes with Billy as Shazam and Dr. Sivana are quite excellent, especially since Dr. Sivana is a whole heck of a lot more powerful since he's entering the scene at a time when Billy has figured out his full potential as Shazam.

All of this does set up quite the wild ride. I've talked to several people who watched the trailers and said the movie looks overly cheesy and dumb. If you are one of said people, I don't know the exact words to say to you since I loved the trailers, but I hope you give this a chance because there's a lot of depth behind all the cheese, which is certainly there. Although I wouldn't refer to it as cheesy. I'd refer to it as lighthearted and fun. This is a superhero movie that enters the "Guardians of the Galaxy" realm of almost being more of a comedy than a superhero drama. And they nail the comedy here. There were several scenes throughout the movie of pure gut-busting laughter that had the whole theater so loud that everyone ends up missing a few lines in the film. That's the type of laughter that doesn't happen to me as often as I would like and am thus extremely refreshed when I'm treated to it. This lighthearted nature also gives this movie an old-fashioned feel to it. I also mean that in a positive way because this is like bringing back an old 1940's superhero story, but implementing it into a modern day setting. And that fits perfectly because the 1940's is exactly the time period that the original comics came from, so it's an ode to what these comics used to be.

Despite the heavy comedic nature, the movie never loses sight of what it is. It's a family drama with superhero characters. And that element is what keeps propelling the movie forward for the entire run time. Thus I feel like comparing it to "Fighting with My Family" from last month. In terms of genre, that's a sports movie about the rise of a female WWE star. But at the heart of the movie is a great story of a family that makes the film so powerful. "Shazam!" is a hilariously entertaining superhero film that even spends most of its run time making fun of traditional superhero tropes, but at the heart of it, it's also a very powerful family drama. I'd argue that it's the most complete film in the DCEU right now because of it. "Wonder Woman" certainly hits higher heights than "Shazam!" and is thus still my favorite DCEU movie, but "Shazam!" is the most well-rounded and has a final act that is far superior than most any superhero movie I've seen. It's so good and so entertaining that I want to go see it again tomorrow for $5 Tuesday, but I'm disappointed that I have to wait two weeks before it actually gets it nationwide release on April 5. "Shazam!" is a definite crowd pleaser and I hope you'll all give it a chance in April because it's worth it. I'm going to give "Shazam!" a strong 9/10.