Shazam! review: Charming superhero film is eventually eroded by its extreme facetiousness

Zachary Levi plays the eponymous superhero in anarchic, abrasively comic fashion

Director David F Sandberg, 132 mins, starring: Asher Angel, Marta Milans, Grace Fulton, Zachary Levi, Djimon Hounsou, Mark Strong, Lovina Yavari. Cert 12A

Superhero movies are determined to cover every age and demographic. Shazam! isn’t just aimed at teenagers. It’s about them too. The hero of this Philadelphia-set story is 14 years old. He may assume an adult’s body when he says the magic word but his sensibility remains that of a rebellious adolescent. The film has a witty, self-deprecating feel that you find more often in rites of passage movies than in stories about heroes saving the world. You can’t help but root for a protagonist who, once he realises he has superpowers, uses them to make strangers pay for selfies with him and to pose at the top of the steps where Stallone’s Rocky Balboa used to do his workouts. He’s as keen to use the galvanising energy he now has at his fingertips to charge strangers’ phones as he is to battle the forces of darkness.

Unfortunately, the film’s charm is eventually eroded by its extreme facetiousness. The jokiness begins to grate. The sentimentality is also hard to digest. Shazam! may be free of the extreme portentousness that generally overtakes DC and Marvel films, but the danger is that it risks turning into a souped-up version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Director David F Sandberg (best known hitherto for horror films like Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation) throws in some creepy set-pieces early on. We see Thaddeus Sivana, a nerdy, bespectacled boy riding in the back of a car. His father and brother, who clearly despise him, are in the front of the car. Thaddeus is suddenly whisked away to meet Shazam (Djimon Hounsou under a lot of hair), the last of the “council of wizards”. Shazam’s powers are on the wane. He needs a new champion to keep the forces of darkness at bay. It looks for a moment as if Thaddeus could be his man.

This may be a youth-oriented movie but Sandberg includes a disturbingly realistic car crash that leaves at least one victim in a pool of blood. There is also a brilliantly shot sequence of a little boy getting separated from his mother at a fun fair. The boy, looking for a toy compass, is lost in a forest of legs. He is too short to see the faces of all the adults crowding above him. This is Billy Batson.

The story leaps forward to the present day. Billy (engaging as played by Asher Angel) is a teenage loner who has been slung out of foster home after foster home. He’s a bit of an artful dodger, cunning enough to bamboozle the cops and the social services. All he wants is to be reunited with his mother. He still blames himself for not holding on to her hand more tightly. “She is still out there. I know it,” he tells himself.

Foster parents Rosa and Victor Vasquez take in the poor, misunderstood boy. As he joins their extended family, the storytelling becomes ever more treacly. Among his new “siblings” is Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), a tiny Tim-like waif, disabled, badly bullied at school but with a fierce intelligence, a very dark sense of humour and a love of comic books.

For a brief stretch, it seems as if Shazam! is turning into a high school movie. We see Billy standing up for Freddy when the bullies come after him. These bullies turn their anger on Billy instead. He flees and, as he does so, engineers his own seemingly random, miraculous encounter with Shazam.

As in the Eighties Tom Hanks movie Big, the film features a boy in an adult’s body. Most of the best jokes here come when Billy is turned into a superhero, complete with ridiculous spandex suit with a gold lightning symbol on his chest. Whereas adolescent Billy is introspective and soulful, grown-up Billy is a grinning, mischievous, extrovert delinquent who can’t hide his own delight and surprise about his own superpowers. Zachary Levi plays him in anarchic, abrasively comic fashion. He just can’t help joking, even when he is trying to keep evil at bay.

Thaddeus Sivana, the little boy seen at the start of the movie, has grown up full of malice and envy. Played as an adult by Mark Strong, he is the villain, determined to harness Shazam’s powers for his own dark purposes. He has a purple lodestar lodged in his eyeball which gives him magic, destructive powers.

The film is as wayward in its storytelling as Billy is with the newfound magic powers he doesn’t yet know how to harness. One moment, hideous succubi will be on the prowl, turning Sivana’s enemies to dust. The next, Billy will be seen taking advantage of his adult body by visiting “gentlemen’s clubs” (stripper joints) or buying beer. The scenes inside the foster parents’ home are very maudlin. Both Rosa and Victor are orphans themselves, and that has made them doubly determined to play happy families. Every meal time, all their foster kids sit around the table, touch hands and give thanks for the extreme good fortune that has brought them all together.

Just as Billy/Shazam is a teenager in an adult’s body, the film itself is a children’s adventure in the form of a grown-up superhero movie. It oscillates between seriousness and extreme whimsy. The final reel showdown, which takes place in a fairground (hardly an original setting) is painfully prolonged and repetitive. There is never enough sense of threat to give us the sense the kids are in any real danger. Mark Strong is good value as the skulking, sneering villain but he is more of a comic figure than he is an evil or intimidating one. It’s questionable, too, whether it was such a good idea to have Shazam pitted against physical embodiments of the seven deadly sins. Gluttony, greed and sloth are among the enemies. The latter in particular can hardly be expected to have much appetite for the fight.