Shazam!

Shazam!. David F. Sandberg. 2019.

Well, I just saw the Captain Marvel movie, so I might as well watch the movie about Captain Marvel.

Wow! New Line Cinema!? That’s a logo I haven’t seen in a while.

Oh, they’re really leaning into the origin story thing in this movie. I. Do. Not. Understand. The obsession with origin stories when doing super-hero movies. I realise that many people want to “start at the beginning”, but it inevitably means that half the movie is over before we get to the actual super-hero stuff… which is ostensibly the subject matter of these movies.

And… all the articles about this being a different sort of DC movie; lighthearted and well not teal: I’m half an hour in, and this is just as turgid as any Zack Snyder turd.

[time passes]

OK, it gets a bit better: They poach a bunch of scenes from Big and those are always fun. But there are so many wasted opportunities: The main bad guy has a bunch of demons at his beck and call, and their designs are so generic that you have to wonder whether they were designed by humans at all, or whether they were just designs the CGI company had on file already.

This is one of those movies where the origin part makes total sense, and I wish the delete key on this keyboard worked so I could delete that paragraph up there, but darn!

The humour is 97% “a kid in a grown-up body talking like a kid”. But all the lines are cribbed from sit-com kids lines and it gets old. It’s from the “kids sure are stupid” school of screenwriting. It’s like they are going for “hey, this is lighthearted comedy, right?” but it’s all schmaltzy nihilism. (That’s totally a thing.)

There are scenes in here that work. But it’s mostly tedious.