A superhero movie that joyfully and jauntily breaks all the rules
Shazam! Cert 12A, 132 min
★★★★★
Dir David F Sandberg Starring Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Mark Strong, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Fulton, Faithe Herman, Djimon Hounsou
With his thick jaw, apple cheeks and rubbery brow, Zachary Levi looks like a child’s idea of an adult. The 38-year-old’s highest profile role to date was as the voice of Flynn Rider, in Disney’s Tangled. But his clean-cut, Crayola-simple features make him perfect casting for the lead in Warner Bros’ latest superhero opus, about a scarlet-suited he-man whose alter ego is a 12-year-old. Despite buff and Spandexed appearances, Shazam is actually Billy Batson (Asher Angel), an orphan picked to inherit a suite of superpowers by an inter-dimensional wizard (Djimon Hounsou).
Shazam! is notionally the latest instalment in the DC Extended Universe – a fellow traveller of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, and whoever the next Batman and Superman turn out to be. But the film doesn’t remotely feel assembled to a franchise-building template: rather, it’s jauntily at ease doing its own thing throughout, which is infectiously silly and unexpectedly warm-hearted. Much of it plays like a feature-length adaptation of the classic playground talking point: “What would you do if you had super powers?” And for Billy, the answer is: test them out on camera (his foster brother Freddy Freeman, played by Jack Dylan Grazer, does the filming), use them to buy alcohol and sneak into venues usually off-limits to under-18s, and make some extra pocket money by posing for selfies with tourists.
Compared with the genre’s worldin-peril standard, the stakes here are barely ankle-high. Even when trouble flares up, the climactic battle takes place in a Winter Wonderland
fairground; there’s a lot of drama around whether or not the big wheel is going to topple over. Yet because the story is actually about something – namely Billy’s coming-to-terms with his own hazy identity – the danger feels significant.
Inevitably, the aroma of Penny Marshall’s classic body-swap comedy Big hangs over proceedings, but director David F Sandberg and writer Henry Gayden capitalise on the resemblance – to the extent that Shazam! embraces the conventions of body-swap comedies more enthusiastically than it does the comicbook origin-story blueprint.
There is a lovely, joking reference to a particular scene in Marshall’s film – arguably the scene featuring a walking piano – as if the film is keen to prove it knows exactly what it is. Even so, there are still ordinary superhero duties to be executed. As a newly forged man of steel, Shazam is a far cry from Superman, who is something of a celebrity. But Billy’s powers are impressive enough for a baddie to stalk into town and try to steal them. His name is Thaddeus Sivana, played by a beadily sinister Mark Strong, and was himself talent-spotted by the wizard as a child – but flunked out after failing the obligatory test of willpower. This involved monstrous personifications of the seven deadly sins who are scary and cartoonish, like Ghostbusters ghouls.
Casting is a strong suit here, and even the incidental characters are distinctive and precise. I’d happily watch an Easy A-style spin-off featuring Billy’s congenial foster parents (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) looking after children with no magical powers at all, while the sparky chemistry between their ad hoc brood sets up a hugely enjoyable ensemble finale with several eye-dabbing scenes.
Its very on-trend running time aside, Shazam! does feel made in the spirit of an earlier age. Perhaps only three or four decades earlier, but it’s enough to set it apart with zip and élan from the overcrowded comic-book field.