I learnt a great lesson from watching Shazam and unfortunately the lesson had nothing to do with family, morals, or responsibility.
No – I learnt not to blindingly trust Rotten Tomatoes scores. Great scores cover up some major stinkers.
Shazam is not a major stinker, but it absolutely rubbed me the wrong way for a multitude of reasons.
No consequences
I do not mean ‘end of the world’ consequences (although the movie failed to establish the villain as any more than a jaded bogeyman).
The film’s entire shtick is wish fulfilment. The perks and advantages of being a superhero are on full display and used to great comedic effect and thrills. That said, any film without a hint of complication is doomed to be a boring film. The necessities of storytelling demand that there is a conflict or issue that the main character must solve, possibly by evolving as a character.
Not once was Billy Batson truly tested. Billy’s personal evolution into a gentler person and brother is not a ‘complication’ or a ‘problem’ to overcome. The evolution should be either means to overcome the problem, or the result and/or realisation after overcoming the problem. Not once was anybody actually killed, excepting of course those board members whose entire purpose in the film is to die gruesomely (I will get to that in a second). The scenes where people are seemingly in danger are hollow and do not resonate because no one behaves as if they are in any danger. Freddy laughs and tells the armed robbers to shoot his accomplice in the chest and face multiple times while being completely oblivious to the fact that they could just move their arm a few inches to the right and cap him with a single bullet in less than a second.
The scene where the bus is in danger of falling off the overpass is played for laughs, as the poor people who were just going about their day fall several metres and hurt themselves humourously on the front windshield. The villain threatens to kill Shazam’s siblings while they are held hostage twice and both times the horror of their predicament is of no concern to them. On the second occasion, the villain tells one of the ghouls to kill the youngest child who appears to be no older than ten years of age, and the child tussles with the ghoul for at least four seconds before the ghoul decides to stop just because Shazam screams at it to stop. I guess the ghoul doesn’t care at all about the fact that she’s completely expendable and has no value to the villain whatsoever, there are four other family members to kill one-by-one to threaten Shazam with to demonstrate that he is serious in his demands, and that the ghoul was given a direct instruction to kill the girl but he stops because the enemy told him so.
The villain threateningly flies above a massive crowd, but decides to shoot lightning at a ferris wheel for no particular reason other than to endanger those people when it collapses instead of causing an actual body-count through first-degree murder. God forbid he does that on a single occasion in front of Shazam to show him that the villain means business.
As viewers, we also have no idea what giving the villain Captain Marvel powers is going to cause, so the stakes even here are hazy beyond belief. We know and understand that it is probably a bad thing, but we also know that Billy won’t give up his powers to the villain because this is a stock-standard origin film. That’s why a film like Avengers: Infinity War is thrilling as the story is allowed crazy moments of concession or failure, specifically when Dr Strange gives up the Time Stone, notwithstanding the viewers’ shock that he acted against his prior undertaking to never do so.
Comedic superhero films past have done it better
As a ‘send-up’ of superhero tropes and drama, the film is middle of the road stuff. The comedy lands very well and some jokes are terrifically funny, but Deadpool was already the ultimate ‘anti-superhero’ superhero film, and I also found the first Antman film to be an elegant superhero comedy with real heart and similar themes of family to Shazam. What that leaves is Shazam not being as cutting as it could have been, and even the training montage retreads familiar ground for the genre. It results in a comparatively weak film as a jack of all-trades and a master of none.
Fails rationalisation tests
The first half is high quality with great jokes, great characters, and an engaging setup, but the film crashes out halfway through at the aforementioned bus scene. This is where I started to cringe, as all logic and real-world sensibility just flies off and never returns.
The bus scene in particular was grating, and the entire bus full of passengers falls the height of the overpass and crashes straight on top of Shazam. Never mind the fact that their speed halted immediately upon falling the enormous height at great velocity; Shazam is here and because he is an immobile object who didn’t cushion the fall at all but still managed to stop them from falling the entire distance to the concrete (an additional body-height worth of distance), they are all somehow completely fine. It’s as jarring as the Princess Leia scene from The Last Jedi, though not nearly as funny.
I already spoke about the scene where the ghoul is ordered to kill Shazam’s sibling in front of him. This is yet another occurrence that defies basic logic.
Batson’s mother’s reaction to meeting her son again after more than a decade floored me. It was almost offensive to the viewer how poorly it was done. The entire subplot was irrelevant to the plot and Billy didn’t need that ‘push’ or trigger from his mother to embrace his new family; the fabric for the character arc was already there and believable without it.
Critic Rob Vaux (Shazam – Movie Review, Sci-Fi Movie Page.com (6 April 2019)) explained it best:
The more down-to-earth material, such as Batson’s struggles to fit in with his foster family or his ostensibly heartbreaking search for his real mother hit every wrong note in the book, resulting in a contrived dramatic pay-off that fails the most basic test of plausible human interaction. People simply don’t behave the way Shazam! insists they do, and the results cost the film its soul.
Billy’s siblings can all use their powers unwaverly and did not require any montage scenes or any humourous learning like Billy had to do. It would have been completely fine to have them be invincible and not using their powers yet, but the film doesn’t care and instead opts to deliver a light show for the viewers in the name of entertainment.
The opening scene of Billy tricking police officers so he can use their computer to find his mother is ridiculous and only minutes into the film. I appreciate that this scene establishes Billy’s character as a boy with not the best of heart or morals and therefore not necessarily worthy of the Captain Marvel powers, but it doesn’t pass the ‘bullshit’ test. Billy’s sibling finds his mother in less than 24 hours because he played Uplink and Watchdogs. It is as ridiculous as it sounds.
Echoes of a time past
During close to the entire film, my thoughts were that the director took great inspiration from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. There were so many stylistic parallels that I fear I might not even remember them all. So pervasive were the nods to those films that I first fell upon the realisation incredibly early on.
Ignoring the fact that 2002’s Spider-Man was the first time the word ‘Shazam!’ was used in a cinematic context, the director did his homework as a lot of the levity felt quintessentially Raimi-esque and the moments of emotional profundity at least attempted to mimic the gravity of those scenes between Peter Parker and either his Aunt May or Mary Jane.
The operatic score, transitions from action to comedy, attempts to make an intimidating villain with dramatic presence (which failed but were noticeable), the way that citizens applaud and revere Shazam with long shots of admiring citizens (which does not seem like a staple Spider-Man at first thought, but superhero movies since Raimi’s trilogy have rarely if ever showed large groups of citizens as grateful and excited to be saved as much as those films did), the horror elements which also couldn’t hold a candle to the Raimi’s Doc Ock scene but were still clear in intention, and even the villain entering the lift just reminded me of Raimi’s knack for contrasting moods.
The director David F. Sampson’s only other feature length films before Shazam are two horror flicks, and I felt very vindicated when I discovered this after having watched the film. His experience and love for the horror genre is clear to see, and I feel there is ample untapped potential with horror in the superhero genre: a potential that New Mutants looks set to steal as yet another groundbreaking variant of superhero genre should it ever be released.
The inescapable parallel of a character that learns the virtues of being a hero and about responsibility is also clear if unintentional. The fact that these morals are literally shouted by Shazam at the film’s close was poorly handled compared to Raimi’s Spider-Man.
There is a clash in Shazam between modern superhero flick sensibilities and old-school fun that never elevates the film beyond a middling affair. It is definitely a shame because I think the director did a reasonable job, but the surrounding aspects of the story hampered any resonance that his talent could have brought to the table.
Flawed tone
Speaking of exposition clunkily delivered: did we really need three separate reminders that the villain’s powers weaken with the fewer ghouls he has unleashed? Wasn’t it already clear after the dude bled from the batarang to the head in the cave and that he healed up when he consumed the ghouls again? I instantly worked it out the moment the film showed us. What’s the maxim again? Oh yeah – show; don’t tell. It is almost as if the kiddies needed constant reminders.
And that’s one of the final critiques of this film; the tone was not handled well. Walking the thin line of inserting comedic moments and punchlines to shockingly violent situations is a dark art of filmmaking that is super hot right now, and it works just as well here as compared to other films guilty of weightless comedic one-liners undercutting the seriousness of events that just took place (I’m looking at you Thor: Ragnarok). This is of course not to say that it does not work, but it is a flavour that works effectively when employed with restraint. Shazam does not have much restraint.
One moment we are on the grand children adventures of Billy Batson and Freddy, beating bullies and rising to YouTube stardom, and the next we are entering strip clubs, swearing, and purchasing alcohol. I love those scenes – do not get me wrong, but the transitions are just a little off sometimes. This is by far the least concerning of my six gripes with the film, so please keep this in mind. The tone of 2019 superhero flicks has changed dramatically since 2002 and each film always contains one or two ‘s-word’ swears that do not feel consistent with the tone of how the characters speak outside of the minimum allowed by the ratings board for a film struggling to retain a PG-13 rating. The f-bombs in the final scene are glaringly bleeped out in what is supposed to be a live feed from a reporter, and it drags you out of the film if the film has done nothing but make you cynical for an hour.
Runtime is way too long
I was bored half-way through the final fight. It just kept going, and was neither visually interesting nor emotionally resonant. I could feel my entire theatre thinking the same as multiple people were talking restlessly.
Obviously, you can never know whether you will enjoy a film without watching it first, but my advice is this: decide before a piece of entertainment releases whether you are interested in it. My experiences are that you will enjoy something if you were willing to go and see a film or play a game you thought you would enjoy already without having perused review sites.
2018’s God of War destroyed me after I purchased it purely on the wings of its critical acclaim, which still holds it at number two on the best rated PlayStation 4 game ever (excluding remasters from previous console generations) and that game was thoroughly disappointing. Neither Shazam nor God of War are bad by any stretch, but you should not let inflated reviews fuel your purchase.
At the time of writing, Shazam sits at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That’s really high. Every Marvel Cinematic Universe film except two sits below on that scale, tying with 2008’s Iron Man, and beaten only by Black Panther on 97%, which is far and away the most overrated superhero film in history.
This is not to speak of the discerning critics; while I do not think the film is deserving of anything below 2 and a half stars, here are some of the most accurate review excerpts courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes:
I am struggling with review aggregate sites; they definitely get it right far more often than not, but some really bad stuff can still rise to the top. However, I do not think it’s the review aggregate sites’ fault (most of the time that is: Captain Marvel and The Last Jedi are two prime examples of controversy in that regard) and it might just be that some bad quality entertainment slips through the cracks of haughty popularism.
I say: be better than that. Vote with your wallet.