SHAZAM!
Director David F. Sandberg
Cert 12A 132 mins
We live in the era of the superhero movie. Since at least the release of Iron Man in 2008, comic book intellectual property has functioned as the tentpoles of Hollywood, raking in billions upon billions and pleasing thousands upon thousands.
More than a decade since Tony Stark donned his high-tech suit, superhero movies have simultaneously congealed and atomised. This month’s Avengers: Endgame typifies such congealing. The much-anticipated film is the 22nd and final film in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe – or at least this iteration of it. My head hurts trying to recall the films in the series, much less the characters’ names and motivations.
Thankfully, you don’t need a superhuman memory to enjoy every superhero movie. Which brings me to SHAZAM!
Easy to watch
I’ll cut to the chase: what I appreciated most about SHAZAM! is that it required so little of me. That surely sounds strange, so here’s what I mean. I laughed – a lot – without the gnawing feeling that I ought to be parsing and pausing over the filmmaker’s Big Theme. Done well, such superhero films can be transcendent (think Black Panther). Done poorly, they can be overwrought (think Captain Marvel).
Furthermore, I understood everything that was going on at every moment, and I did so without having to stare into my phone to apprise myself of the long list of previously introduced characters and storylines. Though both my own cynicism and the unrelenting demands of capitalism lead me to believe that subsequent sequels and crossover films are in the offing, I appreciated the now seemingly defunct feeling of watching a big-budget film that merely winked at the past, rather than depending on it.
And yet, we must also remember that SHAZAM! is a superhero movie tasked with the work of telling an origin story. This time, the hero is the teenage foster kid Billy Batson. He’s an orphan who is searching for his Mum, from whom he was separated while at a carnival as a child. Along the way, Billy meets new foster parents, new siblings, and, eventually, a wizard named Shazam who imbues Billy with the magic ability to transform into an adult superhero by simply uttering the word ‘Shazam!’
Finding his true family
Because describing the plot of superhero movies in detail doubles as a kind of torture – for both the reader and the writer – I’ll stop here. But the basic gist is already established: Billy is an orphan on a journey to find his true family.
Therein lies the emotional and thematic weight of the film, one that filmmaker David F. Sandberg and screenwriter Henry Gayden don’t seem entirely up to taking as seriously as they should. Pitched as a comedy, SHAZAM! is at its best when its characters are messing around, when it feels more like a nod to the intrinsic comedy and wonder of a movie like Big and less like a light-hearted rejigging of Oliver Twist.
In short, SHAZAM! suffers from a tonal problem. I don’t mean that Sandberg and Gayden ought not have tried to be both funny and moving, but that they seemed much more invested in the parody than the pathos, more animated by the gags than the tragedy that functions as the backdrop of Billy’s life. This half-baked commitment to backstory unnecessarily lengthens the movie and ultimately dampens its resolution.
All in all, however, SHAZAM! succeeds because it reminded me of what I used to know: that movies about guys and gals with capes and superpowers can be, before they’re anything else, a whole lot of fun.
