Shazam - 2019

It’s for kids, let’s say it, but it’s not bad. Of course it’s full of silly things because the protagonist is a 14 year-old boy so when given superpowers he goes all silly and pathetic, but there’s also a bit of a real deep story beneath it all. 

Still, I didn’t like a few things: the big, loud speeches, but I know they can’t help it, they do love big loud speeches;

the actor playing the superhero (Shazam…) was… not my favourite choice, and most of all :

the fact that he didn’t even try to act as young Billy. It was supposed to be Billy in a grown-up body, but it was nothing like Billy. Billy didn’t talk much and was not loud, and then Shazam! and he started yelling and talking no-stop and doing selfies with strangers and all that. 

First of all: the magic comes from a very old wizard who is the last one and very old and wants to find a champion to give his powers to so that they’ll be able to keep the seven deadly sins at their place in stone, but he tries kid after kid and is not satisfied. One of them is Tad, whose father and older brother treat like shit, and who causes a car accident while sent away from that mystical place, but his father does not die. Tad spends his life trying to find that place again, and he manages it after seeing a video made by a girl who went through the same thing. He goes there, but instead of becoming the champion, he accepts to host the deadly sins inside himself getting a lot of power from them, basically becoming a supervillain. 

The hero is another kid, Billy, who doesn’t get tested at all, but gets the powers because he is the last hope, so he becomes the new Shazam. By saying Shazam, he can go back and forth from being a kid to being a superhero in the body of a grown-up. 

Billy is a complex character, a kid moving from foster home to foster home because he keeps escaping, running away in search of his real mother. When he was little he got lost, but he never stopped looking for her. Now a couple of ex-foster kids welcome him into their home, but he doesn’t want one, doesn’t want to think of them as family, he only wants to find his mom, thinking that then everything would be ok. Of course there’s something not adding up here, but he is a kid so he doesn’t think that way. An adult would reason that his mom would have found him by now, but he has a very sugared memory of her, and maybe he also thinks that it was his fault for letting go of her hand if he got lost, so he refuses every other attachment because he wants to find his “real one”… and one day, thanks to his foster-brother (yeah, the usual child who can break into federal computers and stuff) he finds her… only to find out that she saw him right away, the day he got lost, but turned around and left thinking he’d have a better life without her… which means she thought she’d have a chance at another life without him, of course, that’s the truth of it. So, poor Billy is confronted with the truth, and has to turn away and go back when he realises that she doesn’t want him back in her life. 

(BTW, she says she was 17??? But how old was Billy then? I thought he looked like 5 at least, when did she have him? Or she meant that she had him at 17 and five years later she was still scared and messed up? No, she meant that she walked away at 17, so she got pregnant… at 11??? Things really don’t add up here…. )

Anyway, things go like this:

Tad opens the chamber and meets the wizard again, but now he’s all pissed and instead of the wizard’s powers he takes the sins, so that ball of energy sort of replaces one of his eyes, and with his new powers he goes to his family’s company, where he takes revenge not only on his brother and father, but also on everyone in that room - the whole council I suppose, but it could be anyone, I don’t know. Tad shows off, saying his father thought he had power because he had money, while he, Tad, has Real power now, but at that the beasts/sins tell him that there is someone with the power to defeat him and that he should destroy the champion, so he decides to do just that. Billy at first test his powers with Freddie’s help (I know this is a movie, but to shoot someone in the head just to see IF he doesn’t die is so not a good idea, it’s just a terrible one as the others they try, such as using an axe to his wrist… I know they are kids, but kids are just immature, they’re not stupid, this was too much, what if something didn’t work… )

Anyway, after Billy and Freddie have a fight, Billy spends his time playing and just hanging around in his superhero-persona, when suddenly Tad attacks him and he realises that although he is invincible against human weapons, Tad can hurt him because he has superpowers too, so he gets scarer and as soon as he can he transforms back into a kid and escapes… leaving Freddie behind who attracts Tad’s attention by calling Billy no-stop. 

Now Tad takes the foster-kids hostage, all of them, so Billy runs back to help after his disastrous encounter with his birth-mother, and together Billy and Tad enter the chamber of the wizard, now empty, so that Tad can take the old man’s staff and use it to gain those powers as well. Of course Billy doesn’t do it, that would be super-stupid, instead he escapes with the kids. 

Tad follows him, determined to get his powers, so they escape to the Carnival, and the kids realise that Tad gets his powers from the beasts inside him and the evil eye, so they try to lure the beasts out of him to leave him without powers, but only six get out. 

Remembering what the old wizard said, Billy finally realises that he can share his powers with his new brothers and sisters (the old wizard was the last one, but he used to have company too), so he tells them to grab the staff and say his name… and here it was the funniest scene of the movie: predictable, yes, of course, but nice nonetheless. Mary, Freddie, Darla, Pedro and Eugene, with the outmost conviction, shout in unison “Billy!”, so he explains that they have to say Shazam and they all become superheroes - I so loved superhero Darla !

Now the five superheroes fight against the beast and also helping the people in need, while Billy confronts Tad, and since he knows (by guessing, I suppose, there’s really no way to know which beast is what sin… ) that the one beast still inside Tad is Envy, he uses that knowledge to insult Envy and lure it out, and it works, so Tad is left with no powers, and Billy takes out his evil eye, meaning he uses his magic to take the energy ball out of his head. Now Tad has no more powers and no means to call the beasts back. The six superheroes enter the wizard’s chamber to put the ball back in its place.

Freddie is alone at school, not only because of the two bullies, but also because after he said he knew the superhero and Billy didn’t show up, everyone mocked him and now they all keep their distance, not wanting him at their table, so Mary, Pedro, Darla and Eugene join him instead, while Billy shows in superhero costume, also bringing… a friend?… we obviously don’t see the face, but we do see the big S on his costume, so that’s pretty much everything anyone needs to know who that is.

So, does that mean all the superheroes are called Shazam? Or none of them, but they all have to say Shazam to change from kid to superhero? Now that Billy broke the staff, there will never be a new set of superheroes to guard the sins once they’re gone?… who knows, but the movie shows, at the end, that Tad is in a cell trying and failing to open the chamber again, when something talks to him, a sort of super-villain-bug that tempts him with new powers… I wonder if they’ll ever do another movie. If they do, I hope the other superheroes have more space that just Shazam…