Shazam

I’m impressed that someone took the time to work out the backronym SHAZAM from the names of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury.  I’m more impressed that the titular character, played by Zachary Levi, doesn’t drive around in a motor home solving crimes.  Yes, If I were to tell a child today about a television show where a guy in a bright orange suit travels the country in a Winnebago solving crimes, he’d probably call the police.  Land of the Lost, Jason of Star Command, Shazam!   Children today will never know the ochre, corduroy wonders (read: nightmare fuel) of mid-seventies Saturday-morning TV.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a prankster but an ally to the disenfranchised.  He quickly stands up for his handicapped foster brother, Freddie Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer).  Their foster parents are a welcome deviation from the norm of cardboard cut-out legal guardians in “grounded” superhero films.  We get to know Victor (Cooper Andrews) and Rosa (Marta Milans) not via ham-fisted, plot-serving, expository dialogue, but through the successes and failures of their parenting skills.

Less is said about Thaddeus Sivana’s (Mark Strong) parents.  We catch up with him much later in life, following a tragic accident that foretells his, and Billy’s destiny.  There’s not much explanation for why, other than his ominous surname, Thad is attracted to evil in the first place.  I often wonder how these super-villains make all their money if, as they often state, they devoted their “entire life” and the whole of their industrial resources to finding that one elusive source of power.  But never mind.  It’s not going to bother you much, because Mark Strong has so much fun playing the cartoonishly evil Dr. Sivana, that you’re not going to care about his bookkeeping.

The film quickly establishes the parallel trajectories of the main characters’ lives.  One righteous, the other greedy, both orphaned from their mothers, and both approached by Djimon Hounsou as the bearded Wizard who tests their fortitude so that he may pass on his powers to the one worthy.  Naturally, it’s the one with the alliterative and less evil-sounding name.

But that’s where the resemblances to comic tropes end.  When Billy gains his powers, turning into the muscled love child of Ben Affleck and Adam Sandler in a slightly perverted version of BIG, he convinces Freddie of his identity, reminding him of the previous day’s conversation at school about desirable superhero powers, “You asked me, ‘Flight or invisibility,’ and now I look like this!”

In addition to these nods to the Penny Marshall loss-of-innocence masterpiece, there’s hints of ROBOCOP (1987) in the subversively funny cruelty doled out by Dr. Sivana–most notably in a corporate coup led by comically-weird demons who look like concept drawings for a darker version of SPACE JAM.  The sequence revels in the absurdity of it all in the same way that the ED-209 boardroom massacre in Verhoeven’s film is a commentary on excess.

Though the gags at times border on cliche–doing good for money, taking selfies, posting YouTube vids–as does the manufactured conflict bridging the second and third acts, the delight of this movie rests in the equal parts of sincerity and fun the actors bring to a much needed reboot of the D.C. brand, besieged by characters and story lines whose self-seriousness is at odds with their discount cosplay aesthetic.  It’s as though Warner Bros. sent spies to the last two SPIDER MAN screenings and took copious notes, right down to the punk end credits.  It’s inspired plagiarism, but that’s fitting given that D.C.’s acquisition of the character stemmed from a twelve-year legal battle alleging infringement of the Superman character by Shazam–originally known as Captain Marvel.

The punchline is that Disney acquired Marvel, Warner Bros. acquired D.C., and AT&T acquired Warner Bros.  Somewhere, Kevin McClory is giggling at all of this, but don’t let it stop you from enjoying this immensely entertaining film in the meantime.