Shazam! (Warner Bros., DC Entertainment, DC Comics, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 1) my husband Charles and I once again had a night to ourselves to watch a movie, and once again we had to watch something other than what I’d originally planned. I’d originally planned to run the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and a DVD two-pack containing both Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 duly arrived yesterday afternoon. Alas, the DVD’s turned out to be unplayable because they were written in the wrong region code, so this afternoon I went to the Whole Foods Market in Hillcrest to return them and I re-ordered both movies on Blu-Ray from Amazon, hopefully for delivery tomorrow. I looked for something else Charles and I could watch and found it in Shazam!, a thoroughly delightful 2019 movie from Warner Bros. and the DC Comics universe. The origin of this superhero character is unusually convoluted even for the comic-book industry, and the best explanation is found at https://movieweb.com/shazam-captain-marvel-name-explained/. The character was originally known as Captain Marvel, and debuted in the February 1940 issue of Whiz Comics, a magazine published by Fawcett. Working around DC’s claim that their rights to Superman precluded any other company from publishing a superhero comic in which the hero got his powers by being from another planet, they looked for an alternate way to make Captain Marvel “super.” What they hit on was that he was under the spell of a wizard named Shazam (an acronym for various real-life or legendary heroes: Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury), and though in his non-hero identity Billy Batson was a 15-year-old, if he spoke the name “Shazam!” he would magically turn into the adult superhero Captain Marvel.

The character was successful enough Republic Pictures made at least two serials about him, in 1941 and 1945, though they made it easier on themselves by having both Billy Batson and Captain Marvel be adults who could be played by the same actor. Alas, he also attracted the famously vindictive attorneys in DC’s intellectual-property department, who argued in court that even though Captain Marvel may not have come from another planet, his powers were so similar to Superman’s they violated DC’s copyrights. Fawcett withdrew the character of Captain Marvel in 1952, not only because of the DC lawsuit but because superhero comics were generally losing their popularity. Meanwhile, another independent comics publisher, originally called Timely Comics and around since 1939, changed its name to Marvel Comics and in the 1960’s created a stunning stable of characters (some revived from Timely, most new) including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Dr. Strange, the X-Men and the Avengers, the last (like DC’s Justice League) an omnibus crime-fighting organization that united various Marvel heroes into one group. Marvel Comics boss Stan Lee wanted Captain Marvel for his company, and he bought the rights to the name from Fawcett – though Fawcett also sold the character’s other aspects, ironically enough, to DC. So both companies had claims to the character, though Marvel’s Captain Marvel became an alien from the planet Kree and he acquired a girlfriend, who in 2012 took on the Captain Marvel mantle herself. Meanwhile DC had the rights to the character’s physical appearance, his superpowers and everything else about him except his name, so they started a comic called Shazam! and made that the character’s name as well.

In 2019 both Disney, which had acquired Marvel, and Warner Bros., which had acquired DC, put movies into production that exploited the aspects of the character each company owned. Disney used the female incarnation of Captain Marvel they’d launched in 2012 and cast Brie Larson, the highly talented actress from the 2015 film Room, as Captain Marvel. Warners reverted to the original concept of the character, including Billy Batson’s leaps from teenager to young man whenever he says “Shazam!” and becomes Captain Marvel, and cast two actors in his two incarnations: Asher Angel as Billy and Zachary Levi as … well, whatever his superhero name is, since writers Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke had a lot of fun with his identity and made the uncertainty about his name a plot point in the film. The movie opens with a sinister prologue in which a father, mother and son are driving through the night in the outskirts of Philadelphia when the boy starts experiencing hallucinations that he’s traveling through space and time. He ends up in the court of the wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou, almost unrecognizable under the sheer amount of hair, both on his scalp and from his cheeks and chin, he wears for the role; it wasn’t until his second or third appearance that I realized he was Black), where he’s offered all Shazam’s magical powers – but only if he’s sufficiently pure of heart to deserve them. Alas, the boy reaches for the magic eye of evil and thereby proves he’s not worthy. Then the family have an accident; mom dies, dad ends up in a wheelchair, and the boy survives … not to become a superhero but quite the opposite, a super-villain named Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong) who traces his dad (Wayne Ward) to the company he’s founded and kills him and everyone else on his company’s board by tossing them out of a skyscraper window to their deaths. Dr. Sivana has also liberated the statues of the Seven Deadly Sins the wizard Shazam had imprisoned in his lair, and they are now at his command, ready in all their CGI finery to come to life and kill.

Meanwhile, Billy Batson (David Kohlsmith as a young boy, Asher Angel as a teen) has been abandoned by his mother (Caroline Palmer) at "Chillydelphia," a winter carnival in Philadelphia, and with his dad in prison in Minnesota he’s placed in various foster homes, from which he escapes in a vain search for his real mom. Billy ends up in the foster home of Pedro Peña (Jovan Armand) and Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans), where he unexpectedly bonds with the six other children they are fostering. He particularly likes Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), a fellow teenage boy who needs a crutch for his leg and who, possibly to compensate, has made an in-depth study of superheroes and is a huge fan of stories about them. Like Sivana in the opening scene, Billy is transported to Shazam the wizard’s cave, but unlike him Billy passes the purity-of-heart tests and Shazam gives him the superpowers. At times it seemed like Gayden, Lemke and director David F. Sandberg were trying to give the DC universe their equivalent of Spider-Man – also a put-upon orphan teen who acquires super-powers, doesn’t know what to do with them, uses them opportunistically and for his own gain until he learns that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility and becomes truly worthy of his capabilities. Charles was also reminded (as was I, even though I’ve never seen it) of the 1988 film Big (not a superhero film but also about a boy who suddenly finds himself in the body of a grown man, played by the young Tom Hanks).

For the first half-hour or so the exposition made Shazam! pretty slow going – at one point I joked, “This is the sort of superhero story Charles Dickens would have written if he’d tried one” – but once the preliminaries were out of the way Shazam! turned out to be a delight. No, it’s not a genre-defying masterpiece like the 1989 Tim Burton Batman or the 2018 Black Panther (easily the two best films ever made about superheroes that originated in comic books), but unlike all too many superhero movies made today it recognized the absurdity of the whole idea and played with it as part of the appeal without going whole-hog into camp the way the 1960’s Batman TV series did. The film climaxes in a big action set-piece set in that year’s edition of the “Chillydelphia Winter Carnival,” the same venue in which Billy Batson lost his mom in the first place (and while he eventually finds her in the film he realizes that his foster parents and siblings are now his real family), in which Dr. Sivana unleashes the Seven Deadly Sins on Billy and his foster sibs until [spoiler alert!] Billy tells them to grab the wizard’s staff and each of them become superheroes, too. Shazam! is a marvelous movie and a reminder of the days when superhero stories were designed to be fun, not angst-ridden tales of misery and self-doubt. There are even two Marvel-style post-credits sequences in this film, one in which Dr. Sivana is in prison under solitary confinement and is frantically scribbling arcane symbols on his cell walls hoping to hit the right combination that will mystically get him out of there, and Shazam (Billy Batson’s adult superhero identity) stares at a goldfish in an aquarium jar, obviously meant as a precursor to the Warner Bros.-DC film Aquaman (which actually came out a year earlier, in 2018, and was nowhere nearly as entertaining as this!).