Shockingly enjoyable movie about the original Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel (ie. THE Captain Marvel), moved to the present day and made somewhat goofier than the great 1940's version whose adventures were no worse than second-best in terms of superheroes in the 1940's (Jack Cole's Plastic Man was first; Will Eisner's Spirit didn't have super-powers).
Shazam is an acronym for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), Atlas (Stamina), Zeus (Power), Achilles (Invulnerability), and Mercury (Speed). Well, when it comes to Captain Marvel (now Shazam), anyway -- Mary Marvel and Black Adam, to name two, have the same acronym but different names from mythology.
The whole thing is a 'low-budget' by superhero standards ($90 million) movie aimed solidly at mid-teens. Billy Batson is invested by the wizard Shazam with the powers of, well, Shazam because DC gave up on using 'Captain Marvel' because they didn't trademark it back in the 1950's or 1960's. Shazam is now Earth's defense against magical menaces, sort of a jollier Dr. Strange.
Billy Batson, a sort-of orphan, has to learn to accept his supportive new foster family led by Freddy Freeman, once a disabled newsboy in the 1940's and now, not working, just as Billy no longer works as a radio host. Child labour laws, am I right, guys?
Zachary Levi is the result of Billy saying 'Shazam.' In the comics, he was generally written as a sort of adult version of Billy with super-powers -- they didn't share a consciousness. Taking a cue from Big, Shazam now possesses Billy's 13-year-old consciousness in a super-powered adult body. Hijinks ensue as Billy and Freddy test out the beer-buying powers of Shazam, among other things.
Much revisionism is heaped on the villain of this piece, Sivana, originally a diminutive mad scientist and now a large, imposing Mark Strong wielding magical powers derived from long-time Shazam foes The Seven Deadly Sins. And I don't mean the Traveling Wilburys song! But Strong always makes an, um, strong villain.
I'm not a huge fan of all the revisionism heaped on Captain Mar... er, Shazam... in the recent Shazam miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. And all of those revisions seem to get info-dumped into this movie, especially over the last 45 minutes. Oh, well. Things play a lot jollier here than in that miniseries, and Billy is much more likable.
The whole thing is nonetheless light and entertaining and often quite visually inventive. It's clearly marked throughout as part of the DC Movie Universe, and the end credits foreground this. Superman does cameo in the live-action stuff, but not Henry Cavill either because he refused or because DC is pivoting away from the dark days of David Goyer and Zack Snyder's DC movies to something more earnest and light.
Hopefully being freed of the demands of an origin story will allow a second Shazam movie to soar and not crash. There's also a brief (unnamed) reference to the 'first,' fallen Shazam champion, Egypt's Black Adam. Dwayne Johnson has been attached to a Black Adam movie for years; the box-office success of Shazam! seems to have jump-started that movie, or at least a Black Adam role in the next Shazam! film. Recommended.
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