Shazam! (Review)

Shazam! (2019)

I am a sucker for "coming of age" stories. It probably has something to do with my own warped childhood, which was a valiant attempt at the ordinary on one hand, and a catastrophic failure to acknowledge the twisted on the other. Stephen King's short story "The Body" and Rob Reiner's film version of the same story, Stand By Me, have rescued my psyche in profound ways, and probably in some ways I've yet to fully understand. So I have a pretty high bar for what a good story about the loss of childhood innocence entails.

I'm happy to say that David F. Sandberg's Shazam! clears that high bar, for the most part. The story begins in 1974, when a young Thaddeus Sivana (Ethan Pugiotto) is summoned by an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to test whether or not he is "pure of heart" and therefore worthy of receiving the mantle of the wizard's champion and the gift of his immense power. Thaddeus is tempted, however, by the Seven Deadly Sins, powerful demons imprisoned by the wizard, who seek a champion of their own. Thaddeus nearly succumbs to them before the wizard intervenes and deems him unworthy, sending Thaddeus away and beginning his search for a champion anew. We flash forward over forty years to the present day, and meet Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a troubled youth running from foster home to foster home, and the least likely candidate to receive the mantle of "champion" from anyone.

Billy is haunted by a particular memory, one that saw him losing his mother (Caroline Palmer) in a crowd when he was very young. He spends his time searching for his mother, determined to find her and restore what was broken by what seems to be freak accident. Billy's story is intercut with the story of an adult Thaddeus, now played by Mark Strong, who has spent the last forty years trying to locate the wizard. He succeeds, and chooses to become champion of the Seven Deadly Sins. The wizard, now desperate, finds Billy, and selects him as his own champion. With the utterance of the wizard's name, "Shazam," Billy is immediately granted the form of his fullest potential as an adult with superhuman abilities played with hokey charm by Zachary Levi.

And this gimmick, the superhuman with the mind of a child, becomes the central conceit of the film. Billy must learn what it means to be the wizard's champion, which is just another way of saying he must learn to become an adult. This kind of genre-blending shows the true potential of the superhero archetype. This isn't so much a movie about a superhero as it is about a boy who must reckon with his dysfunctional childhood and come to grips with his circumstances. I appreciate how the film refuses to indulge in sentimentality—there's no happy reunion between Billy and his mother, nor does the film take the easy way out and try to surprise us by revealing she's been dead this whole time. The truth is actually quite sinister, a fact made all the more pronounced when we realize that the truth is quite close to reality. Billy's mother simply left. She saw an opportunity to shrug off the burden of having to raise a child, and she took it.

In 2019, that concept isn't nearly as taboo as it should be. It should shock us like it shocks Billy. We should feel as betrayed as he does. We don't, because this kind of behavior is a cultural norm. "I was seventeen," his mother tells him when they finally meet, meaning, "I was too young and didn't know what to do." So she gave him up. And I commend the film for not trying to lessen the blow, for not catering to the numerous mothers and fathers who have had children out of wedlock and were far too young and used this same excuse to sidestep their own responsibilities as parents. I appreciate that the film doesn't try and patch it all up, either. Billy recognizes his mother's decision, and walks away. There's no forgiveness here. There's great offense taken, the kind of offense one just doesn't shrug off and forget. When Billy returns the little compass she gave him as a child, the trinket that has defined his life and his search for her up to this point, she doesn't even recognize it. "You'll need it more than I will," he tells her as he leaves. She doesn't even realize what she's done, and can't see the damage she's caused.

The film balances this kind of earthy human drama with traditional superhero antics and a healthy dose of comedy. The kid-trapped-in-an-adult-body gag is appropriately played for laughs, and there's a particularly hilarious scene that sees Billy use his new adult body to acquire beers for himself and his best friend/sidekick Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), only for both of them to balk at the taste and decide to indulge in junk food instead. It's this kind of good-natured charm that makes Shazam! a joy to watch. It's certainly not the biggest film of the year, nor is it the best film ever made. But the point is that the film doesn't try to be. It takes an old Fawcett Comics character now owned by DC Comics and stays true to the character's campy essence while updating the conceit for a modern world. It's old fashioned and rustic in the best of ways, and doesn't try to push the envelope or reinvent the superhero genre as much as it blends one genre with another, showing how versatile and iconic the superhero archetype truly is.

Shazam! is a movie about the loss of childhood innocence and the mythic hero. It's about accepting the state of things without accepting the evil behind it all. It's about learning humility and sacrifice, and naming our sins for what they are. It's about a boy who is abandoned by one family, only to be found by another that acknowledges its dysfunction, yet tries for normalcy in spite of it all. I suspect for many young men and women, Shazam! will resonate with them more profoundly than they realize, even more than a large swath of the superhero films that have been churned out by the Hollywood machine in the past decade.