DCEU Review Series
Shazam!
2019
Director: David F Sandberg
Everything wrong with the DCAU is left out of this film. It’s truly their best film in the entire run. While its’ far from perfect or deeply moving, it’s a fun action comedy. What works for this film is the of lack general knowledge surrounding the character. The film is called Shazam but the character’s name is actually Captain Marvel. DC lost the copyright to the name and couldn’t name the film accordingly because Marvel has a character with the same name. The character itself wasn’t originally a DC property until his comics started outselling Superman and DC launched a copyright lawsuit against Fawcett Publications. The lawsuit bankrupted the publisher and DC took over the rights to the character. DC proceeded to sit on the character with half-assed attempts to bring him back but he never achieved the success of his original run. In the world of DC Comics he’s a character they pull out when they need a good guy rival for Superman. Therefore his character is better known by comic fans but for the general movie audience there’s plenty of liberties which can be taken with the narrative.
The film actually opens with the backstory of Captain Marvel’s villain Doctor Sivana and what has to be a meta Smallville reference John Glover (Lionel Luthor [Lex Luthor’s dad]) plays Sivana’s father. Having John Glover as the parental source of a major bad guy was a nice touch. He’s also a phenomenal actor in everything he does. Sivana gets warped to the wizard Shazam’s cave and offered his power but becomes tempted by the seven deadly sins. The wizard gets pissed and kicks him put. Sivana totally wigs out and causes a major car accident which almost kills his dad and brother. It causes his dad to become paralyzed. They were jerks to him before the car accident, so this certainly didn’t make for a good upbringing. Despite this upset he grows up to be a successful research scientist, not that his family is impressed with that.
The narrative jumps to present day where Billy Batson who is 14 (being played by a 17-year-old) keeps running away from his foster homes trying to find his mom. This gets him in trouble with the law. Instead of getting thrown in juvenile detention for trapping cops in pawnshop, he gets sent to a new foster him. He meets his foster parents and their foster kids who are genuinely nice people which is a nice twist for a movie about orphaned kids. Billy befriends his foster brother, a cripple named Freddy Freeman, who’s really into the superheroes of the DCEU. This connects the film to the larger world but no one wants that.
Sivana is now a middle-aged man who is conducting tests, trying to rediscover the wizard’s lair. He cracks the code and accidentally gets his research assistant killed. She touched the door which caused her to disintegrate. This isn’t Sivana’s faulty but he’s very indifferent to the entire ordeal. He walks into the lair and claims the power offered to him by the seven deadly sins. Shazam has been keeping them imprisoned for centuries up to this point. Sivana is all supercharged with evil and proceeds to wreak havoc. His first stop is his dad’s company where he proceeds to kill his brother, the entire board of directors, and last his dad. You should probably feel a little bad for the people on board but everyone in the room seems like jerk wads with his brother and dad at the top of the list. Therefore Sivana is probably more petty than evil at this point.
After his Billy’s first day of school these bullies start beating up Freddy. Billy defends Freddy, as the bullies chase down Billy, he ends up getting warped to Shazam’s lair. Shazam gives him his power and he’s now able to change into an adult man with superpowers. The plot issue with this is lightly addressed at the end of the film, Billy was never tempted by the sins. All the other people Shazam tested had to choose between his power and the Sins’ powers. Everyone got tempted by the sins and zapped back home. Billy only had one choice. At the end of the film he’s tempted but he already has the power of Shazam, why would he even bother taking the power of the sins at that point? Therefore Billy’s pure heart is never really highlighted. It’s a minor plot deviation from the source comics and doesn’t hurt the overall theme of the film which is family.
Billy reveals himself to Freddy and they begin testing his newfound powers. It’s all done exactly how teenage boys would test superpowers. It’s so genuine, probably the first genuine character logic in the entire DCEU. It’s funny, has action, honestly entertaining. The film gets the emotion right and gives the right chinks in the armor for teenage characters. One of the meta joke moments is how they can’t legally call the character Captain Marvel in the film so they just keep making jokes about what his superhero name should be.
The most heartbreaking scene is when Billy finds his real mother and discovers she abandoned him because she sucks. You almost want to cry, his mom just ditched him with some cops and changed her name. He spent the years looking for her and she almost wants to hug him but her life is crap and the actress Carline Palmer hits this performance out of the park. She holds just enough back that the audience rightfully hates her but can also relate to a small degree. That was all in the performance because it certainly wasn’t in the writing.
Sivana discovers that Shazam created Captain Marvel and is on a quest to destroy Captain Marvel. So Sivana terrorizes Billy’s foster family. Captain Marvel arrives to save them. Action ensues. Notable moment to mention is when Sivana is talking to Captain Marvel about his evil plans, in the sky, from a football field away, and Captain Marvel cannot hear a word he’s saying. A great gag on the trope.
Captain Marvel can’t seem to take Sivana down and eventually realizes he doesn’t have to do it alone. He shares his power with his new foster siblings and together they help stop Sivana and the seven deadly sins. It was a nice twist because superhero assistants are usually reserved for sequel films. Adding it at the end of this first film and making it core to the theme of the story was the right amount of heart the DCEU needed.
The film ends with Billy accepting his new family and is a happy ending for all. Dr Sivana is in jail and the talking caterpillar with high intelligence named Mister Mind recruits Sivana to join an evil organization. This is might be a separate evil organization than the Injustice Society Lex Luthor wants to start at the end of Joss Whedon’s Justice League or perhaps it’s the same one. The DCEU never gets there and since the other films suck, no one cares.
There was potential after this film to turn the entire DCEU around. DC should have double downed on the film that critics and audiences loved and built their universe around Captain Marvel. They could have accepted the stories they already made and just let those characters fade away in the background. But it would be financially impossible to step away from characters as iconic as Batman and Superman because their film universe mismanaged them. It’s more cost effective to reboot your entire universe because even bad Batman and Superman films will outperform a good Captain Marvel movie. But we’re still eight DC films away before DCEU is finally ended. Shazam was the highest it will ever fly.
If the DCEU pivoted to Shazam as their centerpiece they could have made a decent Justice Society of America. We could have seen a Captain Marvel versus Black Adam film. They have the same powers and truly different methods to stopping crime. Some of the bread crumbs could have been folded into a Shazam centric world. Mister Mind could have teamed up with Lex Luthor for the Injustice Society. There was enough here to save the DCEU but the think tanks at the top didn’t see it.
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Written by
Joseph Ammendolea
Owner/President
“I Like To Play With Toys” Productions®
ILikeToPlayWithToysProductions@Yahoo.com