A Superhero Movie For Everyone

If you are a comic book movie person, if you care about the difference between the DC and Marvel Universe, you’ve already decided whether or not you are going to see “Shazam!”. But if you are like me, someone who just wants to know if you should take your kids to see it, or, like me, your eyes glaze over a little bit in the final third of superhero movies when everybody is zooming around zapping each other and the CGI takes over from the actors, well, I am here to tell you that “Shazam!” is a ton of fun, brimming with heart and absolutely worth seeing.

Shazam is considered a minor superhero, and the movie is low budget compared to a Wonder Woman or Avengers.  I actually loved the cheesy Saturday morning TV show from the ‘70s, and cheesy is the operative word here – the character is actually known as the Big Red Cheese. I won’t attempt to explain how he evolved out of a character named Captain Marvel that no longer has anything to do with the Captain Marvel of last month’s bigger-budget superhero movie. That one has crossed over $1 billion in worldwide revenue. Nobody has those kinds of expectations for “Shazam!”, and in fact when I saw it, the guy in front of me said, very happily, to his friends: “well, that exceeded my expectations, which admittedly isn’t saying much.” No matter.

 The movie’s main character is Billy Batson, a 14-year-old boy who has been bumping around the foster care system since he was a toddler. He is constantly on the search for his birth mother, running away from one foster home after another to try and track her down. He ends up in a warm multicultural group home with the world’s nicest foster mom and dad, and the world’s cutest and sweetest siblings. He resists their affection at first, and when his handicapped foster brother, Freddy, gets beaten up by a pair of bullies, Billy walks away, but then dives in and fights back. Running away from the bullies, he gets magically transported to the lair of a wizard who tells him he has been searching for someone pure of heart to imbue with his powers. Billy is not all that pure of heart—he is what you might call a scamp (this whole movie being a throwback in spirit and tone to its 1930s origins). But the wizard is tired and will, apparently, take anyone he can get. The wizard makes Billy say his name, and suddenly the teenager is transformed into the cartoonishly swole body of the adult Zachary Levi. 

 The most enjoyable part of the film is when Freddy helps Billy discover what his powers are: “shoots lightning from his hands”  is a yes, invisibility not so much, and flying takes some time and some pretty rough crash landings to master. At first Billy does not accept the “great responsibility” part of having great powers — he’s actually kind of a jerk. But when the villain comes calling, of course Billy rises to the challenge,with all the zooming and fireworks you might expect, and it all wraps up in a very satisfying way. The villain here is one Dr. Sivana, played smoothly by Mark Strong, despite the part being both underwritten and overplayed - we spend too much time on his dad problems.

 “Shazam!” is both funny and heartfelt, but probably a little too scary for anybody under eight or 10 years old. The highlights of the movie are Jack Dylan Grazer – suitably on the edge of annoying but also extremely vulnerable as the smart-alec comic-book nerd Freddy. As littlest foster sister Darla, Faithe Herman is the cutest kid in movies in the last dozen years, and the always charming Zachary Levi, seen most recently as the charming Dr. Benjamin in television’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” embodies the delight and the confusion of a lonely child who is suddenly imbued with super strength, speed and wisdom along with the lightning and the flying. 

 The laughs, the zooming, and the zapping lead up to a simple message: your family is who loves and cares for you. The Big Red Cheese conveys that message with magic, spirit and joy.