Thoughts on Shazam

This is a mostly spoiler free collection of thoughts.

Mark Strong is a national treasure. It has to be said. He is not an American treasure but I guess the American film industry is borrowing him. He plays the villain, Dr.Sivana, in this movie. This is a different take on the classic villain who is a mad scientist in comics.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a foster kid who is given superpowers by the wizard Shazam. Billy wants to find his mother. Freddie Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) is his foster brother and together they try to figure what powers Billy has. These scenes are fun.

Zachary Levi is perfect in his role of Shazam (although he is not called Shazam in the movie). He really does seem like a kid in an adult’s body.  I guess someone else could have taken the role but Levi is just really good in it.

This is a lot of fun. There are some nods to other movies but a couple are pretty subtle. I might have missed one if I did not see an article about the film.

I think this was really good and I plan to see it again.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder Force was bad

I did finish Thunder Force. It is bad. I did not find many of the jokes funny and I thought some of the pop culture references seemed stale or out of date. (Maybe if I liked the film more I would not mention this.)The prologue was okay, if a little long, but a major plot point established in the prologue makes no sense.  This is Ben Falcone’s fifth film as a director. He also wrote it. I have heard he is a talented actor, maybe he should stick to that. It is kind of telling that he is not directing any project that his wife is not headlining. I thought some scenes or jokes ran long.  This is not as bad as Vacation 2015. That is not saying much though. Ocativa Spencer did not save this movie.  See this  https://slate.com/culture/2021/04/thunder-force-netflix-melissa-mccarthy-ben-falcone-movies.htm  article if you want another opinion.
Read more

Who’s Harry Crumb is not John Candy’s best film but I liked it

Who’s Harry Crumb stared John Candy as an inept private detective investigating a kidnapping. Of course Harry thinks he is a great detective. (That is the source of the comedy.) His father and grandfather were great detectives. He is assisted by the kidnapped girl’s sister Nicki (Shawnee Smith). They have a good chemistry. I liked John Candy but this is a trifle. I probably should not have bought it but I did. (At least it was reasonably priced.) There was a brief bit where Harry disguises himself as an Indian American (not Native American). I don’t think it was really mean-spirited but it would not go over well today. I guess this might be considered Candy’s attempt to create an inspector Clouseau type character.
Read more

Ghostbusters Frozen Empire is not terrible

 I think this movie might be trying to do too much. Maybe the classic Ghostbusters did not need to be here. Perhaps the torch was passed in the last movie.  Also maybe since this is the fifth or sixth movie I watched this week and I listened to a bunch of podcasts, I kind of forgot who a couple of the supporting characters were for a moment or so. Perhaps the film did not reintroduce the characters well. (Heh.) I think the Stay Puff Marshmallow men did not need to be in this movie. There were not in the movie a lot but if there is another one of these movies, they don’t need to be brought back. We already have the Minions, we don’t need c grade Minions. I did not hate this film. It is not as successful as some of the other movies I saw this week (in terms of what the movies were trying to do). Some reviews of this movie mentioned there were a lot of callbacks to the first movie. There were some but they didn’t bring the movie to a halt.  (Camoes from the original cast playing different
Read more