In short: Shazam! (2019)

I am all for, and actually very happy with, DC trying to save its superhero bacon by lightening up a little and actually putting out films with different tones and approaches beyond Grimdark Batman is Rorschach epics. David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! however, really isn’t how you do that, unless one can’t see a difference between light and completely empty.

It’s not that I would have preferred a grimdark reading of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, but I’d rather have preferred one whose jokes aren’t quite as dumb and unimaginative as those in the film at hand, or one that actually knows how to shift between the silly stuff and the (theoretically) deeper bits effectively because it understands that both are sides of the same coin (say Guardians of the Galaxy style). Come to think of it, I would perhaps have been okay with the film if its jokes just were funny instead of inane and flat.

The more serious stuff is treated in the most perfunctory manner, clearly working from the impression that the kids I assume are supposed to be the film’s main audience are just too dense to understand even the tiniest bit of subtlety or complexity – as if something like Bumblebee that aims for the same core audience but doesn’t pretend kids are brain-dead didn’t exist. And man, are there wasted opportunities in the film concerning the nature of families of birth as well as of families of choice, or how a certain wizard who likes to kidnap kids and then tell them they are not “pure” enough is a bit of a creep and an asshole and actually responsible for everything bad happening in the movie (something that’s just barely acknowledged by the film).

Other disappointments belong to the more nerdy space like the incredibly unimaginative way the film wastes mad scientist Dr. Sivana (given by Mark Strong strictly phoning it in) and lets him become a guy who just punches people with super strength, instead of, say, having him preside over the anti-family to Captain Marvel’s family of choice like even the golden age comics knew to do. This, to me, seems symptomatic to the film’s greatest sin: a complete lack of imagination in how to use the material it has been given, superhero movie tropes as a whole, or just the possibility space modern superhero films open between the flying and the punching. In its whole feel of the filmmakers not actually knowing how this stuff works, Shazam! reminds me of pre Raimi Spider-Man superhero movies in its awkwardness.

Sandberg’s direction really doesn’t help the film’s case at all, presenting some surprisingly wonkily shot superhero action that culminates in a climax so badly edited, staged and conceived it boggles the mind how you can even manage to fail this badly at an action scene with all the technical expertise and money this sort of production has available to it.


But hey, at least it’s better than Venom.