Rehomed

Captain Marvel

Shazam!


starring Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Zachary Levi, Grace Fulton, Faithe Herman, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand, Marta Milans, Cooper Andrews, Djimon Hounsou and Mark Strong

directed by David F. Sandberg (Annabelle:Creation, Lights Out)

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This is traditionally where the SPOILER WARNING would go. Read that how you want.

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All superhero stories are stories of lost children. Sometimes a cliché is a cliché because at its first sounding, it speaks an inescapable truth that doesn't so much repeat as it echoes across the generations without dimming, such is the clarity of its purpose. Other times clichés are clichés because OH MY GOD it's so much faster than trying to think of something new to tell basically the same story. You could argue I guess that the superhero-as-lost-child is more of a genre trope than a cliché, but which one lets me practice my accented letters on my Mac laptop keyboard more, trope or cliché? Exactly. And whose blog is this again? Right...

Sometimes the best way to crack the dilemma that is the storytelling cliché* is to grab it with both arms and press your face directly into its warm, squishy flesh. Motorboat it if you have to. If you try to sidle up to it or put some kind of "new spin" on it, everyone is going to point at you and laugh at you and tell you you're a fraud and a simpleton and a one-note, fussy aesthete dedicated to frame-painting and a slavish preference for "tone" over lived-in, fallible, ultimately identifiable human experience. You know, generally.

In Shazam! the writers and director David F. Sandberg simply huddled together and said "Wait, hold up... wait if we started with a LITERAL LOST CHILD?" Nobody's mom is murdered by a supervillain or nobody's dad is kidnapped to go work on the supervillain's evil plan,** no. This is, like, the whole plot can't happen unless one dumb ADHD kid just gets literally lost by his terrible, terrible mother. And in the end, it short-circuits any criticism about cliché, it's crucial to the progress of the story AND it adds more than one genuinely touching grace note of poignancy to the whole affair that really sets it apart from almost all other superhero movies.

In the end, I'm surprised to say my one-word work-up for Shazam! would be... sweet?

Who saw that coming? I certainly wasn't looking forward to this one when I heard it had been put into production. The character itself is a mess. He's got a weird backstory that the film does its best to condense and a convoluted power set that the film purposely makes the core of a its most successful running joke. His costume is a clear Superman ripoff, except he's got a goofy white half-cape that in the comics he can't decide if it goes on his back or kinda off just one shoulder like a saucy shawl... Nothing about him seems finished, which is strange since he's like 70 years old.

And if you didn't know, his name is technically Captain Marvel, but due to copyright fights and lapses, that name belongs to a completely different filmed comic book intellectual property of recent note. The exclamation mark in the title of the film because it's not a name, it's an invocation. The character's name can't be SHAZAM! since every time he'd introduce himself he'd instantly transform into or out of his superhero body and back into/out of that of an emo foster boy. The film deals with this by turning his namelessness into its second best (admittedly by a long, tedious way back) running joke. But hey, Djimon Hounsou is in both! That's fun!

Just to make it better, we have a pedant's paradise of the Frankenstein Problem, where in this case Shazam is the name of the wizard who makes the boy into the Big Red Cheese,*** not the hero himself technically. Technically. Jesus, just reading that word makes your spinal fluid run a little colder, doesn't it? Best move on...

Overall, the film basically plays like a cross between Big and It, two of the most successful single-syllable-titled films of all time. That's right, fuck you, Reds. That movie is like eight hours of American communists on trains. American communists, not the Russian ones, who at least at some point actually won something. I remember zero piano-dancing in that one, or literally anything else.

Shazam! is chock full of adorable banding-together-kids action, like It. Or I think like It. I don't watch horror movies, so I'll have to speculate. There's 100% less terrifying clown monster than It, but surprisingly, higher than 0% instances of monsters eating people's heads. I was pleasantly surprised.

The kids are actually all really good in this, by the way, especially standout Faithe Herman. Zachary Levi is really pretty good, but he does play it a little broad here and there. It's forgivable given the part, but he's a little to clearly aping Tom Hanks in spots.

And Mark Strong is basically cash money as a comic book villain. By my count this is his third one. He isn't asked to be theatrical or smashy or arm-wavy in the Ralph Fiennes Voldemort sort of mode. He brings a sullen, hurt matter-of-factness that plays really well against the pathos and goofball charm of the hero story.

And it is that: it's charming. Sure, a post-credit scene sets up a sequel, but they had one of those at the end of Green Lantern as well (starring exclusively Mark Strong!) and we all agreed to forget about that. It's NOWHERE NEAR comparable to the flailing struggle-fest that was Green Lantern, let me be clear, but I'm saying this was a whole story. I feel like we just got out of it pleasantly surprised. A sequel could be fine, but at this point, I feel like it's almost tempting fate. Besides, a second movie would be about a kid with a helpful, supportive family. Who wants to watch that shit?

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*OK, I promise I'll stop typing "cliché."

**This may only be the plot of Rogue One. And Top Secret!, neither of which are technically superhero films, but both are unassailable classics of American cinema. Also, the second one has an exclamation mark right in the title too, just like Shazam! Argue with THAT.

***I swear to god this is a legit nickname for the character in the comics, because even there he can't escape having his balls busted.