The DC Extended Universe has long been met with criticism and ridicule for its overly dark settings and tone, nonsensical plots, astonishingly bad at times editing, and all around doing none of the iconic characters they are portraying justice.
However, with the beloved Wonder Woman and Aquaman being box office smashes, DC is looking to keep the ball rolling with their latest release, Shazam!
Starring Asher Angel as Billy Baston, with Zachary Levi serving as his powerful Shazam counterpart, the transforming duo attempt to rectify the sins of past DC movies by leading a much more light-hearted, comedy-focused film.
To the movie’s credit, it is funny most of the time. Levi’s performance as a strong superhero with the mind of a teenager is amusing, and his chemistry with co-star Jack Dylan Grazer is entertaining to watch.
Grazer especially puts forth an excellent performance, his facial expressions, overzealous actions and overall likeability remains one of the best parts of the film.
Therein lies a problem, the best part of the movie is not just Grazer, but the many other likeable and fun kids occupying the group home. It’s such a shame we don’t spend as much time with them for you to fully buy Billy accepting them as family.
Instead we spend an exorbitant amount of time with the villain, Dr. Sivana, played by Mark Strong, who does his best with the little character he is given, but overall was never particularly compelling to watch. His motivation is generic, his powers aren’t interesting, and even the fight scenes he engages in with the hero are far from the most inspired action scenes.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the protagonist and the antagonist had more personal stakes, with the exception of the villain kidnapping the kids for a moment, Billy doesn’t really have any unique or engaging reason to fight Dr. Sivana. He was forced to have the power through no effort of his own, he never particularly wanted the powers or wanted to be a hero, in fact, in their first encounter our hero literally ran away from him because he was done with him.
Without an emotional engagement, or personal connection the character has, all that’s there is just a very typical good must defeat evil, leading the conflict to fall flat.
On the technical side, editing is weirdly choppy, sometimes shots won’t dedicate to motions, and more often a shot will begin right in the middle of movement leading to an awkwardly fast cut that can make it difficult to keep track of what is happening.
The movie has such a fast pace that it could be intentional, but still feels jarring nonetheless. Even more jarring are the Seven Deadly Sins’ scenes being surprisingly violent and graphic.
With most of Shazam! being a very kid-friendly, buddy comedy where kids eat snacks and mess around with bullies, to suddenly see a demon literally bite someone’s head off and devour people whole, was a total whiplash I was not ready for.
Shazam! truly is an enjoyable movie, one that you can sit down and have a lot of dumb fun watching and laughing at. It just never leaves any realm of quality beyond that. Sure it never quite reaches the vile awfulness of the likes of Man of Steel or Batman v. Superman, but it nowhere near matches a genuinely good and iconic film like Wonder Woman.
It’s in a decent in between of not bad, but not especially good either. A few good jokes and likeable characters don’t save a largely bland film.
It’ll likely get swallowed up by the Endgame hype and overshadowed by the many more superhero movies to come.
So enjoy it while you can, it won’t be long before this gets lost in the shuffle as one of the more forgettable of the genre.
