I Finally Watched Shazam! and It Was Delightful
This day and age, with the ubiquity of super hero movies you need to really bring your A-game to make a caped crusader origin story stand out. And I am happy to report that Shazam! does that. This movie is delightful.
Origin stories are especially hard, because they are so formulaic. And whenever you are working on genre fare, the question is how do you make your film interesting when the template is so well-known already? We know the basic outline - main character acquires powers; training montage; has a setback and maybe a moment of self-doubt before rising to the ocassion to defeat a typically one-dimensonal bad guy. It’s so well-worn that it’s called the Hero’s Journey for cryin out loud. And when done badly and by the numbers, as it so often is, it can be terribly boring.
So how do you get around the trap set by the Hero’s Journey? Well, you can go in a completely different and darker direction, like Joker did (also, that movie is not about a hero but it is an origin story). You can spend a decade plus building an intricate and interconnected shared cinematic universe that plays like a big budget serialized mini-series, which gets the audience invested in the characters and the world even as it conforms to various genre conventions. You can do what Deadpool did and go the irreverent, fourth-wall breaking route. There are always options, for those willing to put in some legwork when trying to put a fresh spin on genre fare.
How does Shazam! do it? By making its hero a kid. I knew nothing about this character or this movie beforehand, and I’m glad because that little twist does a lot of heavy lifting. It opens many possible ways to tweak the standard super hero character arc. Whenever Superman decides he is going to fly away and leave Earth it’s always so tedious, because you know this is just empty narrative fluff and soon he will be back. There’s nothing fresh or interesting there. The plot is just going through the motions.
But in Shazam! it’s actually pretty fun to think about what a 14 year old idiot would do if he suddenly acquired super powers. The film plays all of this at just the right tone, and a lot of the jokes land really well. It’s nothing Earth-shattering, but the juxtaposition of a kid in a man’s body obviously provides a lot to work with. I think it makes the inevitable showdown with the villain work better as well, because even though you know Shazam is going to kick Mark Strong’s ass the fact that actually under that super hero physique he has a typical teenage marshmellow brain adds an interesting dimension.
Lastly, the way Billy’s foster family were integrated into the story was handled pretty skillfully. It was obvious when the film spent 35 minutes setting up his foster family that they would play back into the plot in some key way (otherwise you would never waste precious screen time developing them). The question was whether it would be done well or not, and to my mind it was. That was smart on director David F. Sandberg’s part. He put the work in early fleshing out those characters so that they could step in and carry the story across the finish line with the audience cheering them on. If he didn’t do the work, and just threw characters at us willy nilly like Woman Woman 1984 did, it wouldn’t have worked as well.
I wouldn’t expect anything less from Sandberg though, who has so far shown a deft thand at elevating genre fare to the next level with Annabelle: Creation. He’s a telanted director, and the film looks great. Combine that with a story that opens up lots of possibilities for riffing on the standard super hero origin story and you end up with something that is becoming increasingly rare: a fresh and fun super hero film. Just don’t confuse it with Kazaam.
