Shazam! Super Funny Superhero Movie Featuring Cast Of Kids As Heroes, With Convincing, Totally Evil Super-villain

Warner Bros/DC Comics Brings “Captain Marvel” or Shazam! To Life In This New Movie

If you have seen every superhero movie, you might have overlooked this one. Shazam! is a very strange movie about an ancient wizard who is about to die and needs to pass on his powers. He apparently begins trying to find someone to give his powers to in the 1970s. However, his first choice turns out to be about as wrong as he could possibly get.

The movie starts in 1974, with a father and his two sons. For some reason, both the father and the older son take pleasure in belittling, harming, harassing, and taking from the younger son. This is bad parenting at its finest, and his father is a terrible father.

While they are in the car, and the younger son is playing with a “Magic 8 Ball” toy (do you remember those???), he is suddenly transported to a magical cave where the wizard resides. The wizard tells him that he is seeking someone with a kind heart to give his powers to. But at this point, the boy notices a glowing orb. The wizard tells him that this is a test, and he is drawn to it like a moth to a flame. There are statues in the cave whose eyes then start to glow. But at that point, he is transported back into the car.

When he arrives back in the car where he was a few moments prior, he tries to get out of the car, yelling and screaming that he wants to go back. This is so distracting to his father, the driver, that they almost have an accident with an oncoming truck. Managing to avoid that, they are then tossed by another truck that comes at them from the side, where they had stopped after the near-miss before. The father is seriously injured, but does survive, and the two sons are not injured.

Fast-forward to the present day, and you see this same person, only he has become a very ugly and bald old man. He has become a psychiatric doctor, and has been trying to find people who have had the same experience as he did. He calls it research on mass-hysteria, but he knows that it is not hysteria.

The doctor he works with does not like him. On this day, however, one of the research subjects had taken a video with her cell phone. The old man focuses intently on the symbols that she had seen on her alarm clock just before she was transported.

Using this information, he writes several sequences of symbols on a door that is in the middle of the room. His doctor colleague begins berating him for bothering her subject during the interview. However, then she touches the door that he just made the symbols on. At this point, she collapses into a pile of dust. This is how he knows that he got the symbols right. He opens the door, and walks into the cave of the wizard.

Barely stopping for pleasantries, he goes right for the orb that had so tempted him before, and was the reason for his rejection, since his heart was not pure. It has not gotten any more pure, and he declares to the wizard that he does not have a kind heart.

He places the orb inside of his own eye, and the statues dissolve, becoming spirits, and go into his body with him. At this point, he leaves the cave and goes back to the place he came from.

Now, since he is a super-villain, you can guess what he does next. He takes revenge on his father and his older brother for their mistreatment of him (which continued past the scene in the car, as his father always blamed him for the accident that took his legs). His father, older brother, and several other people that are present are all killed, either by him directly or by the spirit monsters that he unleashes. This is a crazy scene, quite horrifying.

Later, we finally meet the hero of the story, the one who can set everything right. He is a foster child who wandered away from his mother when he was a young boy. For all of his life, he continues searching and searching, trying to find her, but is always unsuccessful.

He also continuously runs away from foster home after foster home. On this day, he meets his newest foster family, a group of five other children from various life situations, that accept him with open, loving arms. They are a true family, though he doesn’t realize it yet.

Among the first things that he does is steal his new foster brothers very expensive authentic Superman bullet. Then, he defends this younger foster brother, who is crippled, from the local bullies at the school. When he runs away from the bullies who are chasing him after he beats them with his brothers’ cane, this is when he finds himself in that same cave with the wizard.

The wizard does not test him, as the monsters have already been released. Instead, he opens his heart to the boy and transfers his powers to him. The boy turns into a caped superhero, but doesn’t have any ideas about his powers, or even how to change back.

A lot of this movie is hilarious scene after hilarious scene, until the super-villain finds him. First, he finds himself at a local convenience store that is suddenly held up by two robbers. He discovers that he is bullet proof, in addition to having super-strength and other powers.

Once he realizes the extent of his powers, he decides to use them to get donations from people for performing superhuman feats. He impersonates a parent to sign his brother out of school, along with himself. He accidentally shoots lightning bolts at a bus, causing it to fall off the side of a bridge, but he catches it and everyone is safe.

This is where the super-villain enters. After a chase, he is able to lose the super-villain and runs home. Unbeknownst to him at the time, his younger foster brother stays behind to try to find him, and is then captured by the villain.

During the interlude, his foster family (the kids only) have tracked down his real mom, and give him her address. She happens to live two subway stops away from where he is. So, he runs out of the house, and has a very touching scene with his mom. She knew she was leaving him behind, but he also comes to realize that he was better off without her. His maturity in leaving her behind in favor of the family that truly loves him is very poignant.

However, just then, when he takes his leave and heads home, he gets a call from the super-villain on his brothers’ cell phone number. Of course, he flies home to help.

This is where the climactic ending scenes occur. In order not to spoil it, I won’t give many details. I will say that it was one of the most satisfying scenes, with the perfect and unexpected actions taken by the superhero to save everyone and defeat the bad guy (this is DC Comics after all, and the bad guys never win in DC or Marvel movies). I literally was on the edge of my seat, wondering how it was going to turn around from this incredibly low point in the film. But the superhero did not disappoint, and all was well that ends well.

I very much enjoyed this movie from start to finish. It was incredibly hilarious, with so many funny scenes. The super-villain was executed fabulously, with a very engaging back-story and reasons for his villain-ness, and the hero was very brave and intelligent.

His intelligence and courage were very well demonstrated throughout the movie, but especially during the ending scenes. He showed himself to be kind and compassionate, helpful to strangers, and an all-around really good guy. The character arc and what he learned from the events that happened to him caused a great deal of character growth as well. This is definitely a hero that followed an odd and interesting path to becoming a true hero.

I would highly recommend this movie to anyone, and I plan to re-watch it again tonight, if that is any indication of how good it was. Until I saw the Aladdin movie, which was previously reviewed, I never thought I would be interested in this one. But the trailer, which came on after Aladdin, was so incredibly funny that I just couldn’t wait to watch it. Once again, I would give this movie five stars, and highly recommend you see it.

Banner Image: Shazam! Movie Promo. Image Credit – Warner Bros/DC Comics