Shazam! review: a fun-filled superhero film that has a lot in common with Tom Hanks's Big
Dir: David F Sandberg; Starring: Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Mark Strong, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Fulton, Faithe Herman, Djimon Hounsou. Cert TBC, 132 mins
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 in Disney’s Tangled, as the voice of Flynn Rider, Rapunzel’s swashbuckling love interest. But his clean-cut, Crayola-simple features make him perfect casting for the lead in Warner Bros’ latest superhero opus, about a scarlet-suited, lightning-powered he-man whose alter ego is a 12-year-old kid. Despite buff and be-Spandexed appearances, Shazam is none other than Billy Batson (Asher Angel), an orphan hand-picked to inherit a suite of superhuman powers by an inter-dimensional wizard, played by 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 by turns 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 It’s 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 to the genre’s world-in-peril standard, the stakes are barely ankle-high here. 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 as a member of a foster family parted from his birth mother in early childhood – the danger feels significant, since tangible things are at risk.
Perhaps inevitably, the aroma of Penny Marshall’s classic body-swap comedy Big hangs over proceedings, but director David F Sandberg (of the smarter-than-expected horror prequel Annabelle: Creation) 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 comic-book origin-story blueprint. There is a lovely, joking reference to a particular scene in Marshall’s film – arguably the scene – almost 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 (Freddy has a drawer full of memorabilia and is a long-time fan). But Billy’s new 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, whom Sivana brings back with no hard feelings as his revolting bogeyman retinue. The creature design is terrific – the sins are simultaneously scary and cartoonish, like classic Ghostbusters ghouls – while Strong gamely sends up his own villainous gravitas, much as he did in Kick-Ass.
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 moments.
Its very on-trend running time aside (there is no conceivable reason this story should take longer than two hours to get through), 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.
Shazam! is released in UK cinemas on Friday 5 April
