An irresistibly charming and fun “family” superhero movie, in every sense of the word.
Let’s face it: superhero movies have gotten more than a little dark and dangerous since the sunny days of Christopher Reeve and Superman: The Movie. Some of those more serious shows are great, from the very darkest to the truly absurd (we’re looking at you, Deadpool!), but it’s truly hard to think of a single superhero movie of the last few years that you could safely take your under-ten children to enjoy. The latest couple of Spider-Man movies, maybe, both live action and animated, but other than that…slim pickin’s.
Which is one of the many reasons that Shazam! Is such an unalloyed pleasure to behold. It’s smart, it’s cheerful, it holds your interest from the first scene to the last, and it truly is a film for the whole family…and not just because the language is mild and the action is more exciting than violent (both of which are true), but because it’s also about family itself, both the kinds you inherit and the kids you make on your own. And there are enough nods to the kid in all of us to keep the youngest viewer to the oldest engaged and delighted, beginning to end.
You don’t have to know anything at all about the eighty-year history of Billy Batson and Captain Marv–sorry, Shazam (it’s all very complicated and legal; trust us, you’re better off if you don’t). You can safely sit back and relax from the minute that Billy, our plucky but determined young fourteen-year-old, shows up and starts causing trouble: you are in good hands, with a tight, funny, and easy-to-enjoy script from Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke in a film directed by David F. Sandberg, who knows how to tell a story without a stutter or a shadow. (And let’s not forget Bill Parker and C.C. Beck, who created the character back in 1939, or Jerry Ordway, whose reboot–one among many–of the whole “family” in the early 1990’s is really the basis for this version.)
The crew screening Shazam! on IMAX
Everyone is quite rightly focusing on the 100% wonderful performance by Zachary Levi as the growned-up Shazam. Levi’s been a fan (and a fanboy) since he was Chuck on Chuck long long ago, and surprised and delighted us all with his vocal performance as Finn in Tangled. And here he is clearly fulfilling his destiny as the World’s Mightiest Mortal, with a charm and energy and absolutely authentic exuberance that makes you just want to pinch his big newly muscular cheeks. And at least two other performances (among a whole host of really strong–get, it “Strong?”—work by damn near everybody) deserve mention as well: the remarkable Asher Angel, who carries a great deal of this film (including most of the first half hour) on his young shoulders and is every bit as charming and believable as Levi, and Jack Dylan Grazer as Billy’s best friend and soon-to-be fellow superhero Freddy Freeman. You gotta love these kids. All three of them.
And you don’t even have to be a huge fan of the skintight suits and superpower set to love this movie. You just have to be somebody who, at some point in your life, liked to sit in front of the tube and simply love those Saturday morning cartoons (day, decade, and geography notwithstanding) where the kids were smart and the villains were dumb and Good always (eventually) won over Evil, even if it did take some fun time getting there. Worry not. This is your movie. This is everybody’s movie, and we can only hope they make more Shazam!’s fast enough to keep using everybody involved in this one for another, oh, half a dozen adventures before they have to start acting like grown-ups.
Lord knows we won’t–not if we keep getting films like Shazam!
Brad Munson is co-host of the podcast The Dark Multiverse of Stephen King, available now or iTunes or through your favorite podcast supplier. It’s all about horror movies, books, and TV shows, not superheroes (much), but…still…
