Shazam! is Totally Awesome

Shazam! whips. This movie is great. I wanted to see more of this character and his adventures before the movie was even over. I’m already hyped for Shazam! 2. It’s the best movie this year about a character involving the name Captain Marvel.

It’s nice to have a made for kids live action super hero movie. Movies like Into The Spiderverse and The Incredibles also slap, but they’re animated films. This is way more along the lines of typical kids movie. It’s really corny and silly and tries its best to nail the kid side of it. It tickled parts of the Power Rangers fan inside me. Teenager with attitude gets super powers and has to learn to be a hero.

It’s almost a Disney flick like The Lion King. It’s a kids movie but its great for adults too. Big goofy kid stuff, but it also has its dark and spookies. And the dark and spookies are great as well. If the movie didn’t nail how fun and colourful the kid stuff was, then this dark and spooky evil bad guy stuff might have fallen flat. The contrast here is executed really well.

There’s something weird about horror directors taking over big action movies and knowing exactly what they’re doing. Who would have guessed that the guy behind Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation was going to do a great job with a child friendly character? David F. Sandberg did a great job, and he got to show his horror chops at points.

I guess it would be just that a good filmmaker is a good filmmaker, so they know how to make good film. Scott Derrickson did Sinister and an Exorcism movie before taking over Doctor Strange. Peter Jackson did a bunch of gory, bloody horror movies before Lord of the Rings. Sam Raimi and James Gunn have done this as well.

It might be the closest super hero movie in spirit and execution to Spider-Man 2002 that we’ve gotten in 17 years. Shazam is so corny. So corny. But its sincere. Much in the same way Aquaman was big and corny, but this is just done better. It takes itself seriously, but it isn’t a serious movie overall.

I love movies that know what they are and nail that tone the whole movie. The Fast and Furious franchise knows it’s a big dumb car movie series, and they act accordingly with it which makes it super awesome. The Deadpool movies get what they are and they take it and run with it. WWE is at its best when it understands how dumb wrestling actually is and goes with it, instead of trying to mimic UFC or boxing.

This movie knows exactly what it is: a lighthearted adventure comedy. A teenager, who is a bit of a jerk like any teenager, goes to a cave where an ancient wizard gives him super powers and doesn’t know what to do with them besides kid stuff: make YouTube videos, buy beer, skip school, busk for money, take selfies, see boobs, etc.

Oh, but also he has to fight demons. Sprinkle in a few cute shenanigans.

Mark Strong is awesome as the villain. In a movie where the main character is so corny, you need contrast in the villain to counter that. He’s such a straight shooting evil jerkoff who wants to be evil because being evil is power. It’s similar to Ronan in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but Strong has more to do and thus can give a better performance.

This is a movie that I don’t think could exist in a pre-Guardians of the Galaxy world. I think that movie opened up a lot of opportunities for Super Hero movies to become more weird and silly and show that people still can take them seriously as long as they’re made well. I think it also helped to open the door for directors to have more influence in their vision of the project and I think it’s benefitted blockbuster cinema as a whole.

Zachary Levi and Asher Angel both do great jobs. I’m curious how much time together they spent on set because Levi is very believable as Asher as an adult-boy. There isn’t much dissonance at all between the two of them. It’s so refreshing that movies are finding kids that can act instead of using the producer’s nieces and nephews.

There is some excellent writing that really fits the characters. Jack Dylan Grazer is excellent as the fanboy+BFF+nerd. The siblings all get their moment and have at least a couple one liners or moments to shine. I don’t want to spoil it, but I really hope you laugh as hard as I did. It was also neat to see some completely unexpected cameos.

There are some neat little references that are just brief enough that they aren’t distracting, but are fun in the meta whether they’re about DC or just winks towards classic movies.

Part of the movie is stopping the bad guy, but the main arc of it all is How To Be A Hero. That sounds like the same thing, but the focus isn’t on doing hero stuff as much as what it means to actually be a hero. Kind of like how another teenage super hero needed to learn that with great power came great responsibility.

The bad guy vs hero plot isn’t the whole movie though. There’s great moments where this movie is quiet and would be great as a “learning about family” type movie. It’s a better movie about family than a lot of movies that try to shoehorn that in to pretend their corporate product has a deeper meaning.

Also, how often is a movie set in Philadelphia? Especially one that isn’t terrible?

It sets up for a sequel in a really non cynical way. There’s some great payoffs all the way through the movie. Even through the credits you want to keep watching. The credits sequence is fantastic and worth every minute you spend in the theater.

Overall, its just rad. This movie whips ass. Its fun and if DC keeps their efforts along these lines with Aquaman, Wonder Woman and emphasis on the good parts of the pre-soft-reboot-post-Justice-League then they’ll have a really successful universe that’ll have people ripping their pants off like they do for the Avengers. I’m honestly excited for Shazam! 2 and I want to see what happens when Shazam crosses over with Aquaman and The Flash and so on.

Get that, this DC movie is so good it made me want to see this character again before I’d even left the theatre.

@Adam_Pyde on Twitter, Adam Reviews Things on Facebook. CanadianAdam on Twitch.

Captain Marvel is a Marvel Movie.

Groundbreaking title hey? But that’s exactly what the movie is. It’s a Marvel movie. Its every bit a Marvel movie that has Marvel movied as a Marvel movie. Its the formula with a new lead and a mix of returning and new supporting cast. This time with Captain Marvel as the source material.

Its so safe and generic and inoffensive that its basically Marvel’s very own Star Wars: Rogue One. Not quite sure who was asking for it but now we got it. It efforts itself to do the things that Wonder Woman did effortlessly.

This is the kind of movie that Film Snobs point at when they want to paintbrush all comic-based movies as plain bread with a glass of room temperature water.

I think I might have liked it more had it been more linear vs non-linear but I get why Marvel decided to tap dance around another origin story. However, more time needed to be spent on the past to make those moments seem like they mattered and really stuck with the character so that the payoff is that much more beefy when it comes.

But for an origin story you really don’t know piss all about her at the beginning (by design), during the middle or by the end. You don’t really know who she was on earth, you don’t really know who she is besides Super Soldier on the Kree homeworld. At the end of it all she’s still largely the same character personality wise, just now she’s gone from a lieutenant position to being independent.

Some Thor-esque fish out of water/ “what do earthlings do, earthling?” style moments I think would have gone a long way to helping develop the character on screen. To the best of her knowledge she’s a Kree warrior hero space fleet soldier, but after like 30 seconds on earth she basically fits back in immediately with barely as much as a déjà vu flashback as she walks down a street and that’s what triggers the human side.

I do have to give the movie big props for one thing in particular. You know when you watch a TV show like Suits and you’re yelling at the TV for everyone to stop doing things and just pump the brakes long enough to talk about their plans? I guarantee you’ve seen a movie where you wanted to yell at the characters and shake them and say “JUST TALK. STOP DOING. START TALKING!”

This movie does that. Probably the best part of the film. Just the characters talking. The quieter this movie gets the better it is. The louder it gets the more it just becomes another Marvel Movie. There is some really good stuff in one-on-one scenes, or just when two characters are sitting at a table or in a room together.

I still wish Emily Blunt got this role. I don’t know how you could have seen her in Live.Die.Repeat. and not realized how easy this casting should have been. Maybe she told Marvel to suck it after she didn’t get the part of Black Widow. Who knows.

But what I do know is that Brie Larson is flat, and after seeing her in Room, I wonder if it’s an actress choice or was it direction? The characterization gets a little all over the place. Supremely confident, confused alien, brat, smartass, heroic, stoic, etc. And that’s fine, people and good characters aren’t one dimensional. But there is something inconsistent through it all. Maybe its because they were making a character who, in the meta, is far more of a utilitarian into the Quippy Marvel Lead. Something more along T’Challa or Steve Rogers would have felt more fitting. But again, I only know that from my previous knowledge of the character.

Maybe that’s not fair because at this point I’m used to following the journey of characters like Steve Rodgers and Tony Stark where those characters have evolved and transformed over the last decade. But even then, you usually only see a character go through like two or three phases in a film like this. Here it felt like we got six phases as if they were stopped from a slower approach because of Endgame’s impending release.

It could even be that Captain Marvel as a character has similar issues to Superman. They’re too damn strong that they almost become boring. Once they unlock their potential then their potential becomes limitless so any danger loses its stakes.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it becomes paint by numbers. “Do A, fake B, follow C” etc. You could have gone from A to C. You didn’t need B. B added nothing beyond being part of “how to write an act 3” in the generic Action Act 3 guidebook.

I really was bummed the movie spent so much time on earth. I get why they do that because $$$$ but also don’t tease me with this amazing looking futuristic advanced alien world straight out of Mass Effect and then make me spend time in like Sacramento and Louisiana. It bothered me in Black Panther too. “Look at this amazing civilization! …But only from afar. No details.”

The villains were pretty fun. The Skrulls are neat if their makeup/prosthetics do hinder their ability to speak and enunciate. The first bad guy was pretty neat. Ben Mendolsohn steals the movie any time he’s on screen.

Sam Jackson is much the same. He is just able to take over the screen any time he’s on it.

It has moments where it felt like an off brand Guardians mainly due to the music involved. In Guardians, the music is part of Peter Quill. He’s emotionally attached to those songs. In this one, she left earth in like 1988, came back in 1994 (?) and they’re like “Frig yeah, here’s a No Doubt song from 1995. Nirvana, that’s 90’s. Get some Nirvana in our 90’s movie.”

The songs are just there because they’re recognizable 90’s songs and not because they matter. They show a 3 second flashback of her singing karaoke in a bar, but I don’t think they ever show the song. Whatever song that is would have been the right song for your “I know who I am” moment.

Music was distracting. It was just “LOOK AT OUR 90’S MUSIC”. I’m generally not a fan of recognizable pop songs in movies like this unless they really fit. The music should never pull you out of the scene, even for a moment.

Back in Black for the first Iron Man? Hell yeah. Sets the tone and becomes part of the scene. The music in Guardians? I own those records now because the movie and music are intertwined.

Wong jamming to Single Ladies by Beyonce? Awkward and bad. Shoving 90’s songs into a movie about a character who left earth in the 1980’s? Also awkward.

This was much more Suicide Squad with its music than Guardians of the Galaxy.

The 90’s setting isn’t totally wasted. They use it for some good gags: Blockbuster, LOL. Radio shack! Teehee. Slow computers, ahahaha! However you can easily forget you’re in the 90’s pretty quickly as there isn’t much that’s distinctly 90’s outside of the gags.

It was neat to see the 90s in a throwback movie. You don’t often see that. You get 60’s, 70’s, 80’s throwback films all the time. I’m down for a wave of 90’s movies #90sKid. And then I’m even more down for some 00’s movies just to bring Limp Bizkit back to the main stream.

At the very least, there’s lots of easter eggs in the movie. Going back this far allows you to colour in some of the backstory to things you maybe weren’t quite dying for, but its neat to see anyway.

I wrote years ago, that three movies I was dying for Marvel to make were Doctor Strange, Black Panther and Captain Marvel. They went from thumbs up to two thumbs up to worth seeing but you’re not missing anything. As for its place in the Marvel rankings, I don’t think you put this ahead of Doctor Strange. This is very much Ant-Man or Captain America: The First Avenger. There’s nothing particularly bad, but nothing that terrifically stands out. Hopefully a standalone sequel is her own The Winter Soldier.

I bet it sounds like I’m shitting on this movie way too hard to have left the theatre in a good mood. That isn’t quite the case. It is what it is, perfectly fine. But I’m a bit bummed because you can see where it could have been more than it is. And coming off Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Infinity War and even Ant-Man and The Wasp, it just feels so underwhelming to be back in the Copy&Paste style movies.

Especially for a character that’s so bad ass.

@Adam_Pyde on Twitter, Adam Reviews Things on Facebook. CanadianAdam on Twitch.

5 Marvel Movies I Am Waiting For

Doctor Strange

Forgive the latency as I know they have began casting, but I can’t wait. I seriously can’t wait. I love all the magic shenanigans and I like that “powers” are actually becoming a thing in Marvel’s own universe. We have humans with a suit of armor, a soldier on super steroids, a science experiment gone wrong, gods and some master assassins. But no real “magic” like demons and stuff, as I consider Thor and Asgard their own thing and not magic in the Dr Strange way. Also quite like the fact he’d only be passively linked to the Avengers since he was never really an Avenger. Casting choice: Been hearing a lot about ol’ Benedict Cumberbatch which would be intersting, although I do dig the idea of Jack Huston.