Directed by David F. Sandberg

Starring: Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Mark Strong, Djimon Hounsou, Jack Dylan Grazer

Shazam! Is a movie made by comedians. And it was the right move, given this source material, playing it straight would have no doubt led to a disaster. But here we have a superhero who’d I’d never heard of before, and is supposedly a critique on the Superman mythos. Who knows if I even got that right, I’m just going off the vibe the movie gave me. Billy Batson’s transformative state and powers mark a goofy sided Superman, with Freddy and the movie making every possible notice of such. I wonder if this is a play on the idea that Superman is the adult in a room full of children. How he always has to restrain his almost infinite godlike powers to save humanity around him. Now, we have a room full of children who can turn into their own Superman. Comes full circle eh?

I have no idea what I’m talking about. The movies opens stupidly in a car ride with a young boy (his name is Thad?) and his older brother and father. The kid is playing with a magic eight ball, when suddenly! He’s transported to a dark cavernous realm. An old man (Djimon again, is he in every superhero movie now?) approaches him. His gray beard is kind of a bushy joke. He wields a long wooden staff. There’s magic all around. He tells the kid he’s a wizard, the last of a dying Council, looking for one pure of heart to become his successor as champion, to stop the Seven Deadly sins from rampaging the world. He puts Thad to the test, and tempts him with the dark magics of the sins. Thad reaches for it, and fails. He’s sent back to the normal realm on Earth. But how he wants to go back. How he wants those dark magic powers after being told he wasn’t good enough by the wizard. Guess who the bad guy is

Now to present day. Billy Batson is a 14 year old kid running from foster home to foster home. He doesn’t believe in family, a brief flashback shows how he wandered away from his mother at the fair as a baby, and never could find her again. He locks up the local police for a moment in a shop to quickly search his mother’s name in system in their car. He’s been searching for her his whole life.

He is obviously caught. Thrown back into the foster ring, he’s set up with a new couple who altruistically takes in multiple kids as their own. There’s Eugene who takes gaming too seriously, Darla with attachment issues, Mary the college bound, Pedro who barely talks, and Freddy, the self deprecating cripple. Freddy walks with a crutch, and makes extremely dark jokes, many at his own expense. Yes, him and Billy with be the heart of the film.

Back to the bad guy. He’s useless. Grown up now, it’s Mark Strong, still holding that magic eight ball. He figures a way to portal back to that realm with the wizard, except this time he goes straight for the dark magic of the sins. Djimon is fucked.

An encounter with some bullies has Billy on the run on the metro. The lights flash on and off, the people around him disappear, and those strange symbols that appeared before Thad appear on the electronic screens. Billy is in the realm now. Djimon has no time to test him, he grants him the powers of the champion. To get them, he tells Billy to speak his name. Billy’s like, we just met, I don’t know your name. Shazam, the wizard replies. Billy laughs, wait really, that’s your name? Say it! One of the best moments in the movie.

So it goes like this, Billy says Shazam! And turns into Zachary Levi, a fully grown and buff man, but still with his 14 year old mind as Billy. He has super strength, super speed, bullet immunity, and can shoot lightening from his hands among other things. The movie has its most fun as Billy and Freddy figure out what he can and cannot do.

I think Zachary Levi was a great choice for the role, he plays believably as an adult with the mind of a kid, hilariously struggling to hone his unique powers. And I liked Asher Angel as Billy all the while, giving a wonderful performance as kid with no home, but not as immature as a bad portrayal of the role would go. Jack Dylan Grazer’s Freddy is more aware of things than he should be, but in a comedy that works perfectly. I think these were all really good choices, in a movie that in the end is just a goofy origin story.

Shazam is a silly movie, with a dumb throwaway villain, but a good lead, and good humor throughout. The movie does drag a bit painfully in its final act, and just goes on way too long for its own good. But I liked most of it, I think. There’s laugh out loud moments for most of the runtime, and an encounter in the mall between Billy and the bad guy just had me laughing non stop. And a cowardly santa claus who fits in perfectly.

The seven deadly sins manifest themselves as monsters. They’re all dumb. They look dumb and they are pointless. More useless villains that I wished weren’t even in the film. And was it just me, or was the frame rate turned up awkwardly at some strange points in the movie? Mostly in the opening, but then even in later sequences? Whatever. The friendship formed between Billy and Freddy works, though the story has to mostly omit the other children in the family that he lives with. And it’s a credit to these kid actors that they pulled off something believable in movie this ridiculous. And that the movie’s humor mostly is great. And how after a crushing reveal, Billy Batson has to walk away from something he’s always chased. And a final joke right before the credits that is 100% genius.

The DC films have finally started to get better. Except for Aquaman, which is one of the worst movies made in recent years. And really, all of these films are inconsequential in the face of something like Endgame. And as we all count down to the sequel to the greatest movie of our time, do I really care about a kid that yells Shazam! To get his powers?