"Shazam!” Review
"Shazam!" is a new movie from the Worlds of DC canon (or whatever people are choosing to refer to it as). If you know nothing about super heroes, you might find it indistinguishable from a typical Marvel movie. It takes a lot from the MCU formula, especially towards its final moments. In a way, the movie sacrifices a lot of the unique qualities in previous DC movies and they seem to be moving as far away as it can from the tone of the Snyder films. What we end up with is a decent super hero origin story that has a lot of fun and feels really goofy. It's a good thing. But it does have a lot of problems.
The movie suffers from a very generic and boring first act that sticks out in a really bad way. Its dialogue is mostly clunky exposition that feels more like a first draft of a beat sheet than it does a fully realized screenplay. Characters like the wizard Shazam feels out of place and more like a plot device than an actual character. We're also watching the movie develop a flimsy motivation for the villain character (which I don't recall the name of because he was really boring). It's jarringly slow and the rest of the movie simply feels like another movie. It's whatever.
None of the performances really stand out for me except for Zachary Levi's hyped-af portrayal of the titular character and his youngest foster sibling played by a very enthusiastic and fun Faithe Herman. A lot of the movie does seem to ride on the relationship between the main character and this one annoying kid played by Jack Dylan Grazer. It kind of works, especially in the later half of the movie, but that character in particular is really annoying (did I mention that?) and there's this noticeable disconnect between Asher Angel's somewhat dull and reserved performance as the kid Shazam and Levi's big guy Shazam. One is kind of boring and the other is grand and fun. I never once believed that these two people were actually playing the same character. But maybe that will be remedied in future WODC movies (if they don't end up rebooting it... I don't what's going on with this franchise anymore).
The last two thirds of the movie is pretty sweet. Specifically from the convenient store scene onward. What ensues is nothing less of comedy gold. The villain is there but he just feels like a requirement for a movies like this. Very formulaic stuff. It's whatever. It's fun. Cool sound design, funny improv dialogue, great screen presence from Zachary Levi. Nice popcorn movie that most people can enjoy. Maybe I might've liked this movie if it came out a decade before.