電影《沙讚！》影評：[Film Review] Shazam! (2019)

This latest DCEU enterprise proves to be a box-office lightweight compared to its predecessors, but 「lightweight」 is exactly the operative word here. SHAZAM!, the superhero origin story directed by horror genre practitioner David F. Sandberg (LIGHTS OUT, 2016 and ANNABELLE: CREATION,2017), constructs it distinctive lightweight tonality that goes diametrically different from DCEU’s tried-and-tested idiom pervaded by relentless darkness and solemnity.

Given that the protagonists are a bunch of school-age foster children (inclusivity is attentively put into action), SHAZAM!’s tonal shift seems rather apt, no globe-trotting saving-the-world agenda, astral or deep-ocean monarchally familial rivalry or off-putting, swaggering anti-hero riffraff, the story can be boiled down to a teenager’s rite-of-passage of looking for a real home, which does not derive from bloodline, but non-related kindred spirits, meanwhile everyone is having a whale of a time!

A superhero’s mask is superseded by his/her adult alter ego, adolescent Billy Baston (Angel) is chosen by an ancient wizard (Hounsou) from another dimension, as his successor, and bestowed with his almighty power, by enunciating the magic word Shazam! (the wizard’s own name), he can alternate physical forms between his usual self and a towering superhero (Levy), whose multiplex arrays of superpower have been continuously tested by his best friend and foster brother Freddy Freeman (Grazer, sometimes too attention-seeking in front of a more reserved Angel), disabled and geeky in superhero stuff (of course, DC comics only).

Actually Billy’s ascension to a super-being is a last-ditch move from the desperate ancient wizard, after a bad apple, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Strong), who in the prologue, is deemed unworthy as the wizard’s chosen successor when he was a child because he is not 「pure at heart」, then years later, vindictively steals the Eye of Sin and becomes a human vessel of 7 sins after defeating the wizard. Now, Sivana is bent on acquiring Billy’s bequeathed superpower, and eventually he will wreak havoc on, not the entire city of Philadelphia, but moderately, a winter carnival.

Playing tongue-in-cheek jokes at the drop of a hat and amusingly teasing its genre platitude, SHAZAM! is a small-scale (the bus rescuing scene cannot hold a candle to Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN 2’s sensational metro escapade, which is made 15 years ago), family-friendly (6 foster kids with different characteristics and an almost-perfect pair of foster parents), and innocuous funhouse ride that everything diligently plays to the gallery, from adult actors play-acting their inner kids (including Strong’s one-trick-minded villain panache), to a laidback atmosphere only marred by several horror tropes (the visualization of the grisly 7 sins and the boardroom massacre). Visually adequate for its ilk, for a casual viewer (not a diehard comic book fan), SHAZAM! is too endearing to hold any grudge against. En passant, a scathing sideswipe to humanity is borne out of the story that it virtually takes centuries to search for one individual who is truly 「pure at heart」, are we really doomed?

referential entries: James Wan’s AQUAMAN (2018, 7.0/10); Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck’s CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019, 7.2/10).