Shazam!

2019 superhero movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An origin story for Shazam, a new Avenger.

This is a Christmas movie. It's also an 80's movie.

During the opening scenes, there's a scary car accident while a child rambles about these creepy 7 Deadly Sins sculptures with glowing red eyes and a kid who gets separated from his mother at an amusement park and subsequently orphaned. DC is bringing that artificial movie darkness that I associate with its movies, I thought. Fortunately, things eased up, and this became a kind of PG-13 Deadpool, heavy on humor with plenty of winking though there's no character here who breaks the fourth wall quite like Deadpool. Not all of the jokes land, but that's pretty much what keeps this thing floating when the numerous narrative strands always threaten to sink it. An emotional payoff at the end during your typical wildly frenetic action sequence didn't feel earned, mostly because it involved far too many characters, most who weren't really characters the movie had bothered with actually creating. This also irritated me by leaning too heavily on a mishmash of superhero cliches--character relationships, the villain's motivation--but it at least has as much originality as a superhero origin story can have with the creative ways the story has this kid and his sidekick, the other kid, discover the hero's powers. Too often, however, it stumbles around, seemingly unable to find one voice. With the shocking violence and the scares provided by those 7 Deadly Sins monsters and the cartoonish visual humor, it seems like a movie that wants to both have its fun and bludgeon it, too.

Those bullies--they should have gotten that kid who played Butch the Bully in the Cool Cat Saves the Kid movie. It would have been almost as realistic.