The movie I kept thinking about while watching Shazam!, now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD, wasn’t any of the other multitude of superhero films arriving with clockwork regularity in our cinemas these days. No, instead the movie I had on the brain was The House with a Clock in its Walls, last year’s Jack Black-led, Eli Roth-directed throwback creature feature. While Shazam! plays familiar superhero origin story notes, in tone and in texture it is closer to the comedic dark fantasy of Roth’s film, both movies self-consciously harking back to the glory days of ’80s family cinema when the likes of Gremlins or Ghostbusters were as likely to traumatize children as they were to entertain.
The result doesn’t really feel anything like any other superhero film out there, more overtly comedic than even the Ant-Man films, and a refreshingly small-scale adventure that never bothers to try and one-up the city-leveling carnage churned out with such regularity these days.
Shazam! owns the wish-fulfillment element of virtually all superhero stories with its basic premise. Billy Batson (Asher Angel, who I guess is a Disney kid) is a troubled young teenager who has bounced from foster home to foster home, unable to find anyone willing to put up with his constant attempts to run away and locate the mother he was separated from as a toddler. Shortly after being placed into a new group home in Philadelphia, replete with other foster kids who just want him to be part of their family, Billy is summoned to a mysterious keep presided over by an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounsou being [slightly] less wasted than he was in Aquaman a few months prior) who gifts Billy with secret power: If he says the word “Shazam” he will transform into an idealized adult version of himself (now played by Zachary Levi [the Chuck guy, now with muscles]) replete with just about every superpower you could imagine.
On the one hand, “Big with superheroes” is such an obvious idea, it’s a wonder it took us until this long in a post-X-Men world to finally get a riff on it, but actually delivering on the idea is tricky business. Billy has to be selfish enough that his journey towards heroism is meaningful, but he can’t be so obnoxious that you want to drown the little shit. And Shazam himself has to be goofy enough that you understand that this man is being piloted by a child, but not so over the top that he comes across as annoying.
(Sidenote: Comics readers will know that the character’s name is actually “Captain Marvel”, a title which has resulted in decades-spanning controversies and legalities. Without getting into the various litigations, suffice to say that the fallout from these proceedings has resulted in everything from Brie Larson beating up aliens scored to No Doubt (in a movie that ALSO features Djimon Hounsou and Alan Moore’s genre-redefining career rise. Comics, gotta love ‘em.)
Both actors prove up to the task, with Angel letting Billy’s shields crack just enough that you feel empathy for this kid even when he makes, well, childish choices, while Levi’s bubbly energy works wonders. Levi’s wild-eyed commitment reminded me of Brendan Fraser in stuff I loved as a kid like The Mummy, the kind of performance just enough over the edge that you can appreciate the silly without feeling like the whole endeavor is a joke. Levi’s not exactly a stranger to being a leading man, or even to superhero fare (he popped up in the Thor sequels before getting ignobly popped off in Ragnarok) but Shazam! serves as a major announcement that he can hold down the center of a film.
It helps that for a solid stretch, Shazam! cheerfully ignores the tenets and structures we have come to expect from superhero movies and instead delivers as an out-and-out comedy. Shazam! takes no small measure of glee in exploring what a child might do if suddenly given access to A) the adult world and 2) superpowers. Billy’s experimentations with his powers alongside his disabled foster bother/de facto sidekick Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer, Eddie from It) gleefully indulges the innocent power fantasy behind so many of our caped heroes.
Part of why it works is because, and this may be a controversial statement but here goes, Shazam! is the first movie from either Marvel or DC that actually feels like it takes place in the ‘real’ world. It feels like an element of Sanberg’s debt to those ’80s numbers I mentioned up top, as part of what made something like Ghostbusters feel so fresh was the intermixing of the grimy, beat-up city with the special effects. Even in superhero films that try for realism, or try to return to a more blue collar aesthetic, it never quite lands. Spider-Man or Ant-Man may claim at being broke and down and out, but the MCU permanently has one foot out of reality. The other claimant would probably be the Nolan Dark Knight movies, but while Nolan loves his practical sets and ‘believable’ versions of classic Batman hardware, when it came time to portray people outside of the Gotham elite, he fell back on clichés of art-directed hellscapes. It’s like if you weren’t born into either the moneyed upper crusts or serve time in a ninja cult, you were damned to spend life scraping by in a Springsteen lyric.
In Shazam! the kids pass through metal detectors as they slouch into public schools, and the home Billy shares with the other foster kids is littered with home art projects and empty soda bottles. There’s a sense of clutter and actual lived-in life to these sets, the kind of touch Spielberg always used to make his fantasy adventures seem that much more fantastical. It worked like a charm then and it plays like gangbusters now.
The other touch of magic from the Amblin era was the willingness to go waaaaaay too far when it came to violence and terror in what were films ostensibly aimed at children, and Shazam! pays homage to that aspect as well. Sandberg takes his time bringing his hero and villain together, but Mark Strong’s Dr. Sivana is a frequent presence all throughout the film, right from the prologue which follows a young Sivana as he is summoned to the wizard’s temple and offered the power that will one day go to Billy Batson.
Sivana is rejected because he is tempted by the Seven Deadly Sins, depicted in this film as actual, monstrous creatures who want nothing more than to break free and wreak havoc on the human race. The rejection devastates Sivana and leads to the destruction of his family, festering for decades before he eventually makes his way back to the temple and joins forces with the Sins.
Strong has been Hollywood’s go-to villain for over a decade now, to the point that far too many movies seem to pencil in “will be played by Mark Strong” for the villain instead of actually crafting a character who is interesting in any way. But Shazam! offers Strong a chance to be a big fat slab of ham and he clearly relishes it. Sivana is performing “Supervillain” just as surely as Billy is play-acting at being a superhero, and Strong plays him as a gawky nerd delighting in getting the chance to strut and pose like the badass he’s always fantasized about being.
The real threat is the Sins themselves, and this is where Shazam! may go a little too far for some parents. One scene features Sivana unleashing the creatures to settle a grudge for him and the scene plays as a long, grisly shocker that could very well lead to long-lasting nightmares. Hell, I’m allegedly an adult and I was taken aback by just how nasty it gets. Sandberg’s origins lie in horror (he came to prominence off the performance of Lights Out) and you can feel those instincts pulling at the family-friendly leash whenever the Sins come out to play.
While parents may want to have the fast-forward button primed for moments like that, Shazam! is otherwise an easy pleasure. I was surprised by just how committed to being a comedy the film proved to be, constantly undercutting even its biggest moments of action and mayhem with gags and bits. Just when it seems like Shazam! is buckling under and turning into a standard climatic punch-up, it turns over one last wild play and transforms into a slapstick free-for-all that rewrites all its previous rules.
Silly and sweet, Shazam! proves there is an elasticity and range to the DC films that could and hopefully will yield some sublime movies going forward. The shared universe may be buried in a crater that can’t be escaped for years to come, but the standalones like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and now Shazam! prove that the only limits to the comic book ‘genre’ lie in the imaginations of talented filmmakers.