Shazam! Fury Of The Gods

Nicked Fury

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods
USA 2023 Directed by David F. Sandberg
Warner Bros
UK cinema release print

Warning: Very minor spoilers but there’s no way I’m giving away the ending or the really important cameo in this review.

Wow. This film is awesome. And if you want to take that as my final, less detailed verdict of the film so you don’t feel like you need to read to the end, please do so.

And it’s not just the awesome cameo towards the end of the movie where an amazing character restores a semblance of the status quo to things here... although that scene was so brilliant it had me crying by the finish. Nope... the whole film is a great, fun and respectful sequel to the first movie, which was a little better than this but... this being only slightly less better than absolutely brilliant is still pretty good, I reckon.

Okay, there are a few negative criticisms I have to make about this one and I’ll get those out of the way first because, yeah, they don’t even begin to make a negative dent in the movie and I can’t wait to get this thing on Blu Ray (partially because I saw this at Cineworld and I’m guessing the physical copy will be more in focus than how they projected it there).

So, okay, I was disappointed that the big dramatic beat from the first one of Mary Bromfield (still not yet revealed in this iteration as really being Mary Batson, Billy’s sister he didn’t even know he had) getting into college is sidelined to a throwaway scene explaining why she didn’t go. I thought the emotional investment in this character set up in the first film wasn’t given it’s due, to be honest.

Another negative thing was... I didn’t quite understand the physics of the big dome utilised by the villains in this one. It has certain physical properties in one scene which are completely forgotten about in a later scene but, yeah, I guess anything is possible when you’re dealing with magic.

Thirdly, but not so much of a big deal... one of the best lines in the trailers for the movie, about throwing a truck at a dragon, didn’t make final cut... which is a shame. However, the pacing of the scene in question is such that it would have slowed things down unnecessarily and been less credible so I suspect it was better out than in, in this instance.

That’s it. Those are my only negative things about the film. The rest is absolutely brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The cast from the original film, including stand up performances by Asher Angel as Billy Batson, Zachary Levi as Captain Marvel (because, two fingers up at Marvel who ‘legally acquired the name for one of their own characters... luckily, many audience members past a certain age can still remember what the name of the Worlds Mightiest Mortal is), Jack Dylan Grazer as Freddy Freeman (like the first movie, he’s basically the lead kid in this film), Grace Caroline Currey as Mary Bromfield (and Mary Marvel... again, lets call her by her real character name for the purposes of this review) and a load of other returners are all great here. And, by golly they sure fooled me in the first film because, apparently, this is Grace Caroline Currey’s first time playing her super hero alter ego. The girl they had in the first film (which I reviewed here) looked so much like her I just assumed it was the same actress playing both roles in that one so... yeah, don’t know why they bothered with someone else in the original.

And this lot are joined by some nice additions including a couple of super villains played by Dame Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu and, also, a nice turn from Rachel Zegler (in her second film, after playing Maria in Spielberg’s quite good remake of West Side Story). Plus a couple of cameos but, seriously, that one towards the end of the picture... absolutely gave me a huge rush of emotion (while simultaneously keeping me angry at James Gunn... more on that anger in a little while). One thing I did miss was the sequel set up from the post credits of the previous movie but... the final post credits scenes here (there are two of them) is very much a sequel to the post credits of the first. So, yeah, if the direction of DC hadn’t suddenly changed then that talking earth worm ‘Mr. Mind and the Society Of Evil’ adaptation story may well have been coming along at some point.

I’m not covering the plot here but the film is full of great little references both to other comic book characters (including little digs at rival company Marvel) and also some great pop culture references in general. Such as the ‘pediatrician’ scene from the trailer... I’d already spotted the haunted doll from The Conjuring movies in the shot in the previews but I’m happy to say Annabelle remains in the finished movie here. And a nice moment where a guy on the street calls the main character Captain Marvel... and he’s not only played by Michael Gray, who used to play Billy Batson in the Shazam TV series in the 1970s but he’s even wearing the same t-shirt costume he wore in it. And, wow, I love the symmetry of having a character originally co-created for Fawcett Comics (before DC bought the rights years later) by C. C. Beck, get a score by composer Christophe Beck. I mean, I doubt they’re related but, even so.

Oh... and I’m not even going to say anything about the wonderful Unicorns or the fact that the makers of Skittles must have paid a fair amount of money for their quite prominent plot point of a product placement... but I don’t care because, even if it will date the movie some years from now, it was just delightfully done.

And, well, it’s such a good movie with a brilliant, post bad gal defeat denouement scene that, in light of the first of the post-credits scenes here, you just have to hate James Gunn’s new DCU ending policy even more. After Blue Beetle, The Flash and the second Aquaman movie have played out in cinemas later this year, the decision has been made to pull the plug on the current movie DC universe with even their most highly anticipated movie originally on the slate, Wonder Woman 3, completely cancelled. So no more Henry Cavill as Superman (as set up at the end of Black Adam) and no more Justice Society (not to mention the Justice League). The whole thing sucks but these movies are teasing and building towards a series of event movies that will now, unless DC does an about turn sometime very soon, won’t happen. So yeah, while I’d like to see another Wonder Woman and a Justice League/Justice Society team up movie where they take on Black Adam before becoming his ally to ward off some greater evil... it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now. Which is a huge pity, especially after DC have finally seemed to have been gaining traction after their earlier cinematic efforts didn’t quite get things right, it all seems to have been scuppered... unnecessarily, it seems to me.

But don’t let that sourness put you off going to see what is probably the best superhero movie that’s going to be in cinemas this year. I suspect Shazam! Fury Of The Gods might well make my top ten movies of 2023, by the end of it... time will tell, I guess.

SHAZAM!

The Original Captain Marvel

SHAZAM!
2019 USA
Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some mild spoilerage.

Hmmm... okay, I’d better cut to the chase and start off by saying that, despite all the awful things I’m going to say about certain aspects of this film up front, I think it’s a really good movie and would recommend it. And you can imagine how conflicted that makes me feel now I have to write a review of it.

Okay, long story short, Captain Marvel was a character created in 1939 by C.C. Beck for Fawcett Comics (Billy goes to Fawcett School in this movie version). DC sued for alleged similarities to Superman (whom Captain Marvel outsold for a period) a while later and the comic stopped being published. The long gap before his next publication allowed rival company Marvel Comics to buy and copyright the name Captain Marvel for one of their most powerful superheroes. Some would argue that he was just a ‘Marvel remake’ even, of the Fawcett character (of course ‘Captain’ Marvel is now a girl but... don’t let’s get too complicated here, this is supposed to be a very brief history). Think about it, though... even the original Thor was a guy who banged his stick on the ground to be ‘replaced’ by Thor with a bolt of lightning. Marvel have tried a few times to rip off this character, methinks.

Anyway, back to my potted history... DC bought the Fawcett character and started publishing him again in the 1970s. He was still allowed to be called Captain Marvel in the interiors but, because of the Marvel character, the comic was called Shazam! Which is what the 1970s live action TV series was also called, whereas the 1940s theatrical serial was called The Adventures Of Captain Marvel (and you can read my review of that here). He’s been a staple of DC Comics since then but the character has probably changed somewhat over the last two decades in ways I wouldn’t like to guess.

Okay, lets get the bad stuff out of the way first. As much as I like some guy I’d never heard of called Zachary Levi  in the role here... this is not Captain Marvel. This is a mickey-take ridiculing Captain Marvel and I’m sad that DC chose to go down this path. The name SHAZAM, the name of the wizard who granted Cap his powers in all the iterations, which is almost straight out of the comics, is an acronym standing for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury and the appearance of Captain Marvel when Billy Batson speaks the wizard’s name is supposed to conjure up a Captain Marvel who embodies all the qualities of these Gods and Kings. Seriously though... it’s quite obvious that this screenplay does not include ‘the wisdom of Solomon’ into the mix with Zachary Levi here. Instead, we have the same consciousness occupying Captain Marvel’s body... which was definitely not what the original comics were about. So basically, the comedy in this version of the character... and it was always a light, somewhat comical character... is all about body switching, teenage fish-out-of-water stuff which plays like a superhero version of Big (it even has a blatant reference to the Tom Hanks comedy in it) and it does really belittle the character.

Now, I have seen DC do this with the character in the 1990s but I stopped reading after a few issues of that awfulness and I’d hoped that they’d stopped treating the character like that (basically jettisoning the Captain Marvel personae completely). Perhaps they didn’t, which might explain why the movie has taken this track. It’s a travesty and insult to the character and I suspect C. C. Beck (who has a shout out in the movie) would be turning in his grave. Unfortunately, it’s also immensely entertaining and I loved a lot of the performance here. Which leaves me very conflicted now people.

Okay, so another thing is that... and we’re getting into slight spoiler territory here folks... most of the characters look somewhat like their original comic counterparts, except for maybe Billy Batson (Asher Angel), the kid who says SHAZAM! and SHAZAM himself (Djimon Hounsou) who... I’m not going there. But the casting is pretty good. Levi looks somewhat like the character whose looks were originally based on actor Fred MacMurray and Mary Batson (sorry, Mary Bromfield... I guess they’re saving that revelation for another movie) looks just like her, especially when she becomes the unnamed Mary Marvel in the final showdown (she’s played nicely by Grace Fulton here). Similarly, Freddy Freeman looks just great (and Jack Dylan Grazer does really good stuff in the role) although, when he does transform to an unnamed Captain Marvel Jr, he doesn’t look the same as he did in his real life incarnation, like he did in the comics. Although you can tell exactly who he is supposed to be from the colour of his costume.

There are some great moments for followers of the original comics including an early appearance from Mr. Mind, the evil, talking earthworm who controlled the Monster Society Of Evil. He gets freed later on in the movie and this kinda tips the audience off that he’ll be back for a bigger moment later in the story (if you stick around after the credits). Also, Billy Batson says 'Holey Moley!' a lot, which is just a huge point in favour of this movie. Mark Strong as arch nemesis Sivana is, as usual, a truly villanous villain and although he’s too tall for Sivana, he looks quite like him (barring they've given him super powers, which he didn’t have in the comics). Alas, he plays him nothing like Sivana and it’s a shame he doesn’t let out either of that character’s prime Sivana-isms... the constant repeating “Heh! Heh! Heh!” laugh or the perpetual referring to Captain Marvel as “The Big Red Cheese”.

But, despite all the differences and insults to the original characters, the film works really well as an entertaining feature with a heck of a lot of heart and warmth in it. It has some surprisingly dark moments (especially in Sivana’s ‘origins’) but it does some nice new stuff too. For example, using the Seven Deadly Sin statues from the wizard SHAZAM’s lair, which were always a constant in the comics and using them as more of a plot element is nice. Also, Cap’s old ‘double cape’ with the smaller cape at the top does kinda have an equivalent here but, although he doesn’t actually use it, they’ve found a way to make it nicely functional by having it as a hoodie which lays down on top like a second cape. So that was really great. Alas, they don’t have the original button down top from the 1930s version of the character there but, you know... modern movies, you can’t have everything.

There’s also an appearance, kind of, of one of the other DC superheroes in the movie, not to mention a fair few props and reference to the other characters in the current DC Extended Universe films. Also, the first half of the end credits takes the form of a kind of cartoon (and perhaps as a bizarre homage to the end titles of Spider-Man Homecoming, which seems to be definitely the equivalent vibe that DC are going for with this movie) and a few of the regular DC characters appear in this animation. Also, there are two post credits sequences here... the first is mentioned briefly, earlier on in this review and appears mid way through the end titles. The other is right after the credits are finished and, well, it’s a nice little joking potshot at one of the other DC superheroes.

At the end of the day, despite the terrible treatment of the title character, SHAZAM! is still a fun and very watchable DC movie with a lovely supporting score by Benjamin Wallfisch. Easily one of the best films they’ve done. Well... I say title character but... not once is Captain Marvel referred to by his actual name in the movie and that’s very interesting because, in the recent Marvel movie Captain Marvel (reviewed by me here), Brie Larson’s character is never once referred to by that name either. It’s like both companies didn’t want to open up old legal wounds... very strange. I’d definitely recommend SHAZAM! to fans of superhero movies and, despite a few very dark sequences, it’s pretty much an out and out comedy which works fairly well. Die hard admirers of the original character, such as myself, may have a bumpy ride with this one but, at the end of the day, the artistry behind the film certainly helps DC get away, to an extent, with reinventing the character for a modern film going audience. Hoping for a sequel which would hopefully feature one of my favourite characters from the comic, Mr. Tawky Tawny The Talking Tiger, at some point soon.

Annabelle: Creation

The Doll Monty

Annabelle: Creation
2017 USA Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

Well Annabelle: Creation is a fun film.

Much more entertaining than I was expecting given that I wasn’t all that into Annabelle (reviewed here). That being said, it does spend all of its time wallowing in the most obvious ‘horror movie clichés’ you can imagine but, although there are no real surprises throughout the movie (barring a couple of nice moments), it at least executes these conventions in a concise and joyous manner and, while there’s almost a deliberate absence of character depth to the movie, it really succeeds in one of the main intents of a horror film... it’s a fair bit scary in places.

Annabelle: Creation is, of course, actually the fourth film to feature the title character after a quite important set of appearances in The Conjuring (reviewed here) which was, in my humble opinion, probably the best horror movie of the last decade and a brief glimpse of an appearance in The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case (set in my home town here in the UK and reviewed by me here). Now, I have to admit I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for this movie since the stories themselves are obviously no longer relying on the real life events that are alleged to have taken place in The Conjuring movies and I’m guessing this is Hollywood totally doing its own thing with the ‘character’. To be honest, there was already a ‘creation’ scene in terms of how the doll came to be demonically possessed in Annabelle so I couldn’t possibly see where this thing could go without contradicting itself. Well, if that’s what you are thinking too, fear not, there’s actually a pretty good tie in towards the end of the movie with a little segment which takes place twelve years after the main body of this one... where you get to see certain events you’ve seen before in another movie from a different point of view and which ties it in, quite neatly, to the canon as a whole. No real continuity problems there.

The film starts off with a doll maker putting the Limited Edition brand on the wooden packaging of the first Annabelle doll and it introduces us to his wife and child. However, as in the trailer to this movie, it’s not long before their daughter meets with a tragic and untimely death. The child’s sudden death is handled quite jarringly in a masterstroke of build up and editing, much more intensely implied than as seen on the film’s marketing campaign. The film then jumps on a number of years to a nun and her six charges as they move into the big house with the doll maker and his wife, setting up as a new orphanage. Of course, right away the haunted, demonic shenanigans begin with the children and the director then spends the rest of the time trying to pile on the fear. Which he does quite well but, like I said, clichés...

And I do mean clichés. One of the main child protagonists is partially crippled by polio and right away we are introduced to a chair-lift which can only move up or down once the occupant is seat belted into it. So there’s a situation just rife for a horror chase scene right there and you can bet the director sure uses this set up later. Similarly, we have a ‘dumb waiter’ in one of the rooms with a door which keeps sliding open. Yeah, right. No possibilities for haunted, horror escape routes there then, right? We even have a sinister scarecrow and a big, scary well on the property so, you know, the writers and director are taking no chances in throwing potential horror tropes at you from the word go here. I’d be super critical of all of this if it wasn’t for the fact that the director knows he isn’t fooling anybody and milks the horror elements with almost perfect timing while utilising some strong performances from the kids. One of whom I was especially fearful for, played by Lulu Wilson... due to her similar appearance, in my mind, to a young Hayley Mills.

Now, the film is quite intense but that didn’t stop me from seeing the humour in the film and kind of laughing at certain ‘fright moments’ due to their manipulative obviousness, it has to be said... although certain members of the audience were certainly freaking out right from the start here. Don’t know what that was all about... it wasn’t that scary.

The film certainly plays with the conventions of horror without doing much that’s original with them, I’m sorry to say but, the possible unintentional humour of a few scenes certainly doesn’t go against it and I think most lovers of the genre will be happy with this one. Despite the lack of surprises, though, it does have one very surprising moment in it which isn’t pertinent to the main plot... at least not of this movie, at any rate but, certainly of a movie which is coming to cinemas next year. Keep a sharp eye out for a little scene near the start of the film where Sister Charlotte (played by Stephanie Sigman) is showing the doll maker (played by Anthony LaPaglia) a photograph of her last diocese. There’s a beautifully done, shared universe moment here which I’m sure we’ll get the back story to in 2018. Actually, there’s another nice little moment which may catch people off guard during the film, also using a photograph. I won’t go into too much detail but let’s just say “the eyes have it” and leave it at that.

Benjamin Wallfisch provides a score which, while not exactly a million miles away from what other composers are doing within this genre at the moment, is an effective bit of blood curdling "sound design seeks atonal ferocity with GSOH for scary scoring". It’s appropriate and effective when he pulls out all the stops which he does frequently because, despite the conventions being solidly delivered by the director of this movie, Sandberg also does something which you can’t usually get away with if you want to produce an effective horror movie. This being that there are actually very few rest moments between the various horror set pieces. There are some, obviously but... they are very short and so the horror sequences are almost just piled one on top of the other with very little time for the audience to calm down and pause for breath. This really shouldn’t work as effectively as it does here though so, again, it doesn’t really harm the movie. I suspect the pausing beats that are in here might well have been longer in the first assembly of the movie but were maybe whittled down to up the pacing on this one... who knows, the film might have been even more effective for some longer ‘downtime’ sequences but, as it stands, it seems to manage to hold up nicely without them so, no worries there.

Eagle eyed fans of the real life horrors behind the haunted Annabelle doll will get a little treat too. It’s not exactly a secret that the scary Annabelle doll used for these movies looks nothing like the real life counterpart made famous by the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren. When one of the characters is given a new doll right at the end of the movie, that rag doll is actually a copy of the ‘real’ Annabelle doll so, you might want to keep an eye out for that. Just don’t leave that eye out for long though or you, too, may become the subject of a real life horror filled event.

And that’s me done on Annabelle: Creation. I really wasn’t expecting to like it but, although I did have moments where I was more comically amused than scared at certain points, it’s a pretty intense, single minded ride which horror fans should really get on with. A word of warning though... if you leave when the credits starts rolling then you are going to miss out. There are two post credits scenes on this movie... one half way through the credits which is pretty much what you were expecting the film to do as its last shot anyway but then, hold on because there’s a more substantial appearance of another character once the credits have finished. I won’t say anything about this now but I’m sure I’ll be mentioning it again in a future review, if you catch my drift. In the meantime though, this ones a minor but effective horror concoction that genre fans will not want to miss.

Lights Out

‘Fraiders Of The Ghost Dark

Lights Out
2016 USA Directed by David F. Sandberg
UK cinema release print.

And so on to Lights Out. I’ve not seen the original three minute short film by the same director, which he has chosen to expand into his first feature film, but this is certainly a horror movie which had an effective trailer and kinda lives up to ones expectations of it, to a certain extent. It’s the old horror cliché of 'things' which can’t be seen doing what they’re doing until it’s too late, which is on display here.. as seen in a gazillion horror movies when the monster lives in the shadows and intrudes on the fractured reality of the protagonists when they, but not the audience (who are already in a heightened state of tension), least expect it.

The ghostly and very real, in terms of the harm it can do, monster in Lights Out is an entity which can only function in the dark. Perhaps the most recent cousin to this creature is the invention, by writer Steven Moffat, of the Weeping Angels in the British science fiction series Doctor Who. In that show, those specific creatures appear as statues and are quantum locked so that they are not able to move if they are being observed. Once a person's attention or line of vision isn’t focussed on them, however, such as when a person blinks or is in a dark room, they move very fast and "come to get you." The creature in Lights Out is pretty much another variant of these creatures in that she, her name is Diana, can only function in places where light, or at least most forms of light (as it happens, without spoiling an obvious moment which a few of you might not see coming), reduces the creature's functionality and, as importantly, visibility, to zero. So... you know... watch out for those shadowy areas of a room... which reminds me of another Doctor Who creation called the Vashta Nerada but I don’t think this is a direct homage or steal... just two different writers finding common ground in the way they approach their, genuinely suspenseful, horror tales.

One of the more impressive ingredients of Lights Out is that the main characters in the movie don’t fall into the old cliché of disbelief until proven otherwise, for the most part. Indeed, it’s shown quite demonstrably that disbelief leaves you ill prepared and ready for a body bag in one sequence where a couple of characters enter the haunted lair of the Diana-monster and don’t return in one piece. So it’s nice that the main characters consisting of Martin, played by Gabriel Bateman, his ‘mentally challenged’ mother Sophie, played by Maria Bello, his step sister Rebecca, played by Teresa Palmer and her boyfriend Bret, played by Alexander DiPersia... are all on each other’s wavelengths from pretty early on in the movie. Asides from a pre-credits sequence which features prominently in the trailer for the movie, people fall into their roles in finding out how to best defeat Diana fairly rapidly in this and, it has to be said, I found this a much more refreshing approach to the ghostly shenanigans on show in this movie.

Of course, one of the biggest clichés going in horror films since they first began, the wandering around a place in the dark, is neatly circumnavigated by the writer and director by turning it into one of the main ‘rules’ of this creation. Indeed, the various protagonists in the movie spend almost their entire time trying to keep the lights on in whatever environment they find themselves in and this, of course, means that the audience doesn’t question the movie so much when they find out that, once again, Diana has found some way of disabling all the lights. So, naturally, the writer and director take full advantage of the way the spooky shadows and shapes, as our heroes and heroines wander around with candles, flash lights and whatever else they can find, are cast against the audience’s collective peripheral vision in an attempt, quite often successful, of wringing the full amount of suspense and fear they can out of them.

If it fails, sometimes, to provoke the necessary reaction, I thinks it’s down to how seasoned some horror film watchers are and their relationship with other recent films of this ilk which are, perhaps, done a little more expertly in some places... although this movie certainly makes up for it with its enthusiasm. Where it falls down a little, though, is with the origins of the character which, while seeming to be all out in the open for the dissection of the main characters and those of us watching them, are actually a little more hazy and shrouded in mystery than you might at first realise. For instance, the science fiction concept which has created Diana is something not entirely unlike what happens to the Dr. Manhattan character in the comic book Watchmen and, of course, the movie counterpart. However, while the movie doesn’t go into specifics about the ‘incident’ which caused the creation of this malevolent apparition, allowing one to infer the rest as something which is best left to the imagination, it does tend to gloss over some pretty essential information surrounding the relationship between Diane and Martin’s mother, Sophie. Since the ending of the movie absolutely hinges on this specific relationship, it has to be said that I quite often found myself questioning the ‘up and down’ status of this ‘ resurrected friendship’ in terms of the credibility of the main premise. Without this central relationship, you can’t have the ending which this film seems to tell us is the solution to everyone’s problems... but it did feel bereft of common sense in terms of the mother, for a lot of the time, so it didn’t quite ring true to me in that regard.

However, this is a really minor grumble and, although it’s not exactly the scariest of this year’s horror movies, it’s certainly a nicely executed one in general and, even though the genre rules are mostly adhered to, it does so in a way that doesn’t necessarily make you feel like you’re covering the same old ground again in terms of movies designed to make you jump out of your seat. I mean, yeah, alright, we absolutely are covering the same old ground again... but it does it in a way that makes it seem less important in terms of the variations of the characters you usually get in this kind of movie. There’s also a nice moment involving an electronic car key and its use as a means of survival at one point that was certainly worth the price of admission, as far as I’m concerned. That and the wholly appropriate and unsettling, at times, score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which I thought was pretty good.

So is Lights Out the most terrifying movie you’re going to see this year? Not even close. It will, however, certainly give you an entertaining night out at the cinema and, although I personally don’t need to see it again, I don’t have any qualms about happily recommending it to anyone who is contemplating going to see this one... even if they are already fans of the genre.