Shazam!

It’s hard to think of a funnier comic book film, and not just lately, either. Billy Batson is, in short, a hero Marvel can only envy from their DC competition. No muscleman with the soul of a teenager, which we have seen so many times... But a teenager with a muscleman body enjoying his newfound abilities exactly as you’d expect from a teenage boy. Original, impressive, sympathetic and 100% successful. Great fun for a mass audience doesn't have to simply arise from a flood of more or less well-off, mostly cheap jokes (right, Deadpool?), it can still be playful and clever, and makes sure not to forget about the story and characters in it. Luckily. And besides all that, Shazam! also impressed me in part by the old-fashioned way in which it is filmed. It looks like that a lot of decorations are really just decorations, not digital special effects, and the sculptures of seven sins with ominously blazing eyes as if they fell out of films like Ghostbusters or The Golden Child (and when they come alive, the monsters are digital, but they look like they are rubber) and everything is accompanied by an amazing orchestral soundtrack. (10.04.2019)

For me, one of the worst comic book movies in recent memory. The acting is at the level of B-movies and the TV visuals definitely don't add much to it (the CGI looks like a ten-year old movie), and the childish humour didn't really appeal to me either. Mark Strong is unconvincing as the villain, the action is mostly nonexistent and the finale is plain to the point of woe. Santa at the end was fun, but I won't even remember the film after a while. Nothing for me and at times I was even ashamed. 40% (11.04.2019)

I was expecting a lot more. Shazam is a nonconflicting, easygoing comic book for kids and I can’t understand how Sandberg could accept in this form. With the monsters, the film doesn’t do anything that would be really scary and the humour never deviates from the track of the predictable. I was also monumentally pissed off with the discrepancy between the human and the magical person of the main character. It feels as if, together with the magic powers, the personality of the hero changed, loosing a couple dozen points of IQ. If understand correctly the concept of Shazam on paper, the humour should be based on an unruly teenager getting superpowers and, since he doesn’t know what to do with them, he starts fooling around; until the circumstances force him to assume responsibility. But in the film, Billy isn’t unruly at all! Quite the contrary, he behaves in a relatively mild and asocial manner, while also being more mature and independent than his peers. And BAM! When he gets the superpowers, he suddenly becomes this self-confident cool guy who wants to show off? It doesn’t work at all. (16.05.2019)

Shazam was made as a friendly treat for kids and it works well on that level. It's a sort of superhero version of the classic Big. But DC still suffers from lackluster screenplays and, despite potentially provocative hints of something better in store, the story is uninteresting and often illogical, even in the world in which it takes place. Not to mention all of the stupidity on the part of both the heroes and the villain (in his umpteenth role as a fiend, Strong has no surprises left). Levi isn’t very nice; he was much more bearable as a child. Some of the jokes work really well and were killed only by repetition. Even so, it’s worth watching. With any luck, Black Adam will have a more impressive production team. Let’s hope Johnson demands one. (19.08.2019)

When I am really looking forward to going to a movie, in most cases I get an experience that can at least partially meet those expectations. That's why even two weeks after watching Shazam, I am still trying to convince myself that I actually liked Zachary Levi's first film hit, but here that doesn't help me. The humor works only when the titular superhero appears on the screen in his pubescent way, the mythology of the sins is unnecessarily brief, and although the action is appropriately light and imaginative, during the final carnival clash, I was shaking my head and cursing the editor for stretching a family-friendly film almost a quarter of an hour past three. I was thrilled with Wonder Woman and Aquaman, so the thought of how the last of the royal trio falls two steps behind its predecessors will bother me for a long time. (23.04.2019)