Shazam! review: A charming, funny and surprisingly conventional superhero origin story

One of the best films to exist within the DCEU, Shazam! is a soft-toned superhero film that caters to those looking for a fun adventure without the usual brooding cape crusader.

One of the more unusual superhero films in recent history, Shazam!, achieves the same effect one feels tipping down a low sloping roller coaster with eyes wide open and landing on the ground without vertigo stomach. About redemption, judgment and finding the hero inside yourself, it’s a corny piece of a comic strip that somehow never comes off as a corny piece of a comic strip, putting the charm in charming.

For over 10 years, really ever since Tim Burton darkened the Batman logo from black and yellow to just black, comic book movies have gone down a dark path. And by dark, I mean violently driven by emotionally aggressive or unstable characters that either make the film a crime noir or drown them in melodramatic seriousness. The DCEU is one comic franchise that’s fallen heavily into the abyss in their attempts to compete with Marvel, but now I think it’s time to finally congratulate DC on a job well done.

Shazam! is the DC film I’ve been waiting for. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Aquaman, and Wonder Woman was certainly enjoyable, neither were bad films but Shazam! knocks them both flat by deleting almost everything that’s come expected of comic book films and reverts back to the fun-loving adventures they once were with a focus on childhood trauma and innocence.

One plus to this film is the villain, who we meet before anyone else in his own backstory. The movie starts with a little boy on a road trip with his emotionally abusive father and older brother when he’s suddenly transported to a dark cave inhabited by a wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou). The wizard gives him the opportunity to control powerful magic but when he fails the test of morality, the wizard sends him back with the promise that he’ll never have power.

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He returns to the car with his family and starts panicking, causing his father to crash the car. The boy, damaged by years of rejection and resentment, grows up to become the villain of the story, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), the most generic bad guy in the history of bad guys. Bald with a scar across his eye, a long dark leather overcoat and a name that starts with the Doctor prefix; practically tailored made for villainy.

Fast forward years later and we meet the hero of our story, 14-year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) on the run from social services and numerous foster homes in favor of searching for his long-lost mother. After getting separated from her at a carnival years ago, he’s spent his whole life searching for her, a fantasy he’s built up in his mind that if only he can find his mom, he’ll finally belong.

He gets sent to Victor and Rose Vasquez (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans), two former foster kids who have taken in six, including Billy, foster kids to raise as their own. One of them is Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), a disabled nerdy teen who lives and breathes all things superhero as a means to escape his physical and social ailments who completely stole my heart.

If I could, I’d dedicate this entire review to him, wrap him in a fuzzy Superman blanket and force feed him hot chocolate and snickerdoodle cookies.

Sweet little nerdy Freddie, with his overly expressive eyebrows, shifty face and mile-a-minute motor mouth, who some might recognize as the hypochondriac kid from 2017’s IT, keeps the story moving even when the reluctant hero tries to backtrack. At least a quarter of the film rests on his shoulders. His relationship with Billy is the heart of the story.

Their other siblings, ranging from a wide variety of ages, includes Mary (Grace Fulton), Eugene (Ian Chen), Pedro (Jovan Armand), and Darla (Faithe Herman).

I don’t want to give too much away but long story short, when Billy says the name of a wizard he becomes Shazam, a chosen champion meant to protect the world in an adult body, the perfect version of himself played by Zachary Levi.

Levi really sells himself as a confused 14-year-old trapped in a grown man’s body, recreating the role Tom Hanks performed in Big but less fidgety. There’s even a Big reference about halfway in if you can find it.

MORE: Is Shazam! suitable for young viewers? 

When granted his new body and powers, Billy goes to superhero expert Freddy for help with learning the important guidelines for all thing’s superhero, such as the significance of flying, saving people and that you must have a lair either underground or overlooking the water. Unfortunately, no real estate agency has a lair available for buy.

As Billy discovers his powers, he faces the internal conflicts that’s caused him to run away from more than one foster home. He looks out for number one, the typical “if I keep people at a distance, they’ll never hurt me” logic, self-sabotaging personal relationships until no one wants to get close. The whole thing is a check-off list for superhero cliches but at the same time, it’s incredibly self-referential, twisting the usual boring power discovery montage around into something original by simply embracing everything about the genre.

The whole third act and final battle and possibly every moment after the 105-minute mark are as commonplace as the Batman TV show from the 1960s framed in a new light. The villain, who the kids literally refer to as “the supervillain”, mirrors Billy/Shazam as someone who lost everything because of a single tragic event, growing up trying to find something he thought would save him.

Just as Billy spent years searching for the mother that abandoned him, Dr. Sivana spent his entire life searching for power as a result of being a vulnerable child. They are the same inside and out, both credulous children in adult bodies, one more frightened than the other. The only difference is, Billy found a family and Dr. Sivana didn’t.

Through them, our reluctant hero learns power isn’t worth having if you can’t share it with anyone, allowing him to finally let go of the past and accept his foster family as his permanent family all the while trying to stop the supervillain from harvesting all dark magic. Predictable but wonderful and we must be thankful that there isn’t any screaming damsels or super serious villain monologues. Thank you, movie.

This is the kind of movie DC should be making, not forced cinematic universe bait, but well thought out coming-of-age comedy-dramas with a talented cast. The costumes may look ridiculous and the trailers might lead one to think it caters towards a younger audience but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I haven’t laughed this hard at a superhero film since Deadpool.

Funny but not at the expense of character depth and with a surprisingly large number of jump scares. When you least expect it, a bus will come crashing through a window or a car will fall from the sky.

Because this is part of the DCEU, Batman and Superman both exist and are acknowledged, but director David F. Sandberg is clever in his portrayal of the shared universe, leaving several references here and there but never diverting away from the hero that’s front and center. It’s all Shazam, but I will say that Superman has a brief cameo. Very brief, no dialogue or even a visible face, but a cameo all the same.

Shazam! is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, language, and suggestive material. It’s now playing in theaters worldwide. Go see it!