“Shazam!” Review

Is this what comic book fans are asking for?

After the success of the Dark Knight trilogy, WB thought it would be a good idea to Dark Knight-ify all of their superhero properties, so they started with Superman in Man of Steel. Critics weren’t happy with it. Then they did Batman v. Superman. Most people weren’t happy with it. Meanwhile, the MCU were making consistently above-average comic book movies, and a commonality between all of those films were that they were more light-hearted. Naturally, WB thought that humor and light-heartedness were the key to making a good superhero movie. The result? We get a bad, bad movie like Shazam!.

The craziest thing about all of this is that critics love this film. I saw headlines saying things like “finally, a comic book movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously!” and others along that line. Have they not seen Suicide Squad? Or Aquaman? Those films didn’t take themselves seriously. Whether or not those films are good is another question.

Shazam! is not an atrocious film. It’s also not good by any stretch of the imagination. I initially thought that Zachary Levi wouldn’t be a very good choice for a superhero, but I actually like being proven wrong when it comes to movies. He ended up being the best part! Did I laugh at any of jokes? I’m actually not sure that I did. However, he was able to give a performance that seemed genuinely childlike and innocent, which is obviously reflective of his character (for those who have no idea, Shazam is a teenage boy named Billy Batson who receives powers from a wizard, and then becomes an adult man.) To me, it didn’t matter if the jokes landed so much, but more so that his performance came off as believable, which it totally did for me. You know who else gave a good performance in this movie? No one.

Poor Mark Strong. I love that guy. Was he bad? Not really, he just joins the vast collection of forgettable superhero villains, and that to me is a waste of good talent. How about the supporting cast? Well, Billy’s best friend played by Jack Dylan Grazer, most notably from 2017’s It, was OK. He probably would have been better off playing Billy Batson. I don’t even remember the rest of the cast members, because they were given mostly throwaway roles. I’d say the most egregious of the performances came from Billy Batson himself, Asher Angel. There was such a woeful inconsistency with his character. Whenever he played the teenage boy, he would come across as a depressed, emotionless, angsty boy. After transforming into Shazam, he becomes an incredibly animated and excitable character. While Angel has to share some of the blame here, I put this more on the director, David Sandberg. I feel like he didn’t completely realize that Billy Batson and Shazam were the same person.

The film’s insistence on injecting “joy” and “fun” into every scene also got tiring quite fast. If Shazam’s conflict with the villain Dr. Sivana comes across as a joke the entire time, then how am I supposed to get invested in the narrative? Well, the answer to that would be the characters. How can I get invested in the characters when the main character is charismatically bankrupt as a teenager, and beaming with life as an adult? Heck, even the main story arc for Billy Batson’s character is kind of thrown away in a scene that has zero emotional impact near the beginning of the final act.

Correlation does imply causation, folks. Is the lack of humor and joy the reason Batman v. Superman was received poorly? No. It was because it was a poorly conceived, written, and performed movie. The question shouldn’t be “aren’t superheroes allowed to have a little fun?” We already know the answer to that, and it’s a resounding yes. Case in point, Spider-man: Homecoming, one of my favorite comic book movies to come out in the past few years. That film’s humor works so effectively because it not only features a premise that is smaller scale and has the right atmosphere to work with (high school), the humor also works effectively because there are moments where it does take itself seriously. Shazam! insists on trying to make you laugh at all the wrong times, and it’s extremely noticeable.

The question we should be asking instead is “aren’t superheroes allowed to have serious films?” and that question should also have the answer as a resounding yes. I actually enjoyed Man of Steel, I think it’s my fav DCEU film. How can you not entertain the idea of a serious story when you have a character who is essentially god-like, and has an identity crisis? Why do characters always have to joke all the time and dish out one-liners when they’re leveling buildings and causing the end of countless lives?

I realize that more than half of my review of Shazam! has been spent not talking about the movie.  I just think that the direction of comic book movies has gone in a bad way. The sad thing is, a character like Shazam should have a tone of being more light-hearted, and they still managed to screw that up by being way too over the top. WB is still trying to figure out how to win over their audience, and I think they lack a sense of balance. “Serious” comic book films should not be automatically associated with “dark and gritty.” But what do I know, I’m mostly over this genre anyway. Zachary Levi does his best to carry this film, but the end result is one of the most disappointing comic book movies I’ve seen in recent memory.

Grade: C/65

“Fighting With My Family” Review

Every now and then you need some movie comfort food. This is one of those movies. Fighting With My Family is about as predictable and Hollywood as it gets, but the performance from the very hard-working Florence Pugh and direction from Stephen Merchant make it a very enjoyable ride.

There are things that do not interest me, and then there’s wrestling. Perhaps one of the sports that I am least interested in, I had a feeling that I was going to get bored throughout this movie. However, I was actually pretty entertained by the way the film delves in on some of the technical aspects, and even the theatrical aspects of WWE wrestling. Not only does it give you a pretty detailed behind the scenes look at how some of the fights are put together, this film shows all of the hard work behind it all, and you can’t help but respect what these people do, even if it may not be interesting to someone like me.

I’m a fan of Stephen Merchant as I’ve always found that his brand of humor is pretty much up my alley. That classic dry British humor is pretty evident in this film, but there’s also a lot of funny parts due to the sincerity of the characters. I’ve never seen any films from Pugh, but I’m a fan. I think she does a great job portraying the real life wrestler Paige, and the supporting cast is pretty great too. Shout out to Vince Vaughn as the WWE instructor! He had a pretty great dramatic performance in this film. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a film role he was in, but props to him.

The dynamic that Paige shares with her family is a focal point of the movie, and I’m glad that Merchant decided to spend a lot of the film with every member, especially Paige’s brother Zak played by Jack Lowden. Everyone in her family is passionate about wrestling, and you can’t help but be passionate about their passion. While eventually the film focuses more on Paige, Merchant’s decision to bring in scenes of the family every now and then illuminates Paige’s familial wrestling roots.

Like I said earlier, this film is a 100% feel good movie. It has all of the familiar trappings of a Hollywood movie, and yet it resonated a lot with me. It’s certainly not an amazing movie by any means, but everything about it is done just well enough to make it worth a watch. The characters are charming, the emotional beats are effective, and Pugh really does a great job of portraying an outcast trying to make it big in an intimidating industry.

Grade: B/79

“Booksmart” Review

Booksmart may be one of the raunchiest movies I’ve ever seen. Why is it that movies about high school are always the raunchiest films? Is it because that’s all that high schoolers think about? Are the late teens the years of peak debauchery? Regardless of this existential issue, Booksmart is a genuinely funny, albeit inconsistent film.

This film takes place during the last night of high school before graduation, between best friends played by the wonderful and upcoming actors Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever. The chemistry between these two are incredibly apparent right from the start. You can tell that these two girls have had a history with each other, and their ability to make fun of each other and support each other comes from a really authentic place, which is great to see.

There are some really hilarious scenes throughout this film. However, it often gets offset by the fact that all of the characters in this movie are waaaay too over the top. Everyone is dialed up to 100 in every scene, and it’s almost unbearable at times. There are some specific characters that just do not feel like real people. They are caricatures of extreme high school tropes, and often times it falls flat. However, sometimes that ridiculousness allows some really funny scenes to happen, so I guess it’s a double-edged sword. I didn’t recognize almost any of the kids in this film, but I think most of them did a pretty good job all things considered.

If you can’t handle inappropriate stuff, I cannot NOT recommend this film to you enough. Maybe it’s been a while since I’ve seen a teen comedy, but man I was legitly surprised by how raunchy it was. I get that comedies like to push the envelope of getting a reaction, but usually that reaction elicits laughter, and for the most part it didn’t do that for me. But, comedy is subjective so it could have been drop-dead hilarious for others.

What this film needed most apart from its stellar leads was some subtlety from the rest of the supporting cast. I think of a classic high school comedy like Mean Girls, and the reason that that film is so good is because while the characters still exemplify the various stereotypical high school personas, there is a groundedness to it. That film is able to perform a difficult dance between the absurd and the believable/relatable. In this film, everyone is trying to steal the spotlight and get the most laughs from the audience in the scene, and it just seems a bit too jarring. However, there are some pretty heartfelt moments that really worked in this film, but because they were so effective, it makes you wish that there were more of those moments.

Doing comedy is hard, and on top of that, doing female-centric comedy is hard. I’ll be the first to admit that I laugh way more at male comedians or movies about dudes being idiots, as opposed to females doing the same thing. One of the first things I noticed as the credits were rolling was that this film was written by four women. I think they honestly did a pretty fantastic job writing from a female perspective amidst all the crazy shenanigans that the characters get up to. Olivia Wilde as director also did a pretty stellar job capturing all the nuances of adolescence and the awkwardness of trying to fit in. Overall, I wouldn’t say that this movie was for me, but I still found a lot of entertainment from it. I don’t think I’d watch it again, but I can say that it’s a pretty solid comedy for what it’s trying to do.

Grade: B/77