Shazam!

DC has finally made a Marvel movie. Almost.

Shazam! is a film that is both silly and self-aware enough to know just how silly it is. This makes for a fun, and frequently funny, film about a 14 year old boy becoming an adult superhero, and behaving exactly as you would expect a 14 year old boy to behave.

The 14 year old in question is Billy Batson who was separated from his mother in an amusement park when very young and never reunited. Young Billy has spent the subsequent years bouncing from foster home to foster home until he ends up being taken in by Rosa and Victor Vasquez where he joins the five other foster children under their care.

Following a run-in with a pair of local bullies, Billy finds himself face to face with the last of the wizards charged with protecting the world from the Seven Deadly Sins, who also happens to be looking for a champion. And 14 year old Billy becomes Shazam — a 14 year old boy in the body of a 30 year old superhero.

Billy immediately turns to Freddy, his superhero enthusiast of a foster-brother and the pair begin, hilariously, to determine what Billy’s new-found powers actually are, as well as explore how much they can get away with when one of them looks like an adult.

Every superhero film needs a villain and, in this case, we have Dr. Thaddeus Sivana who, at the start of the film, was found to be not pure enough of heart to become Shazam and has spent the subsequent 20 years trying to steal the powers for himself. There wouldn’t be much of a film if he didn’t manage to achieve this.

If you have young kids, be warned that there is one scene involving Sivana, the gargoyle-like demonic beings that represent the Seven Deadly Sins and a boardroom invasion that may prove a little bit too intense.

That aside, Shazam! manages to be a light-hearted film about finding a family and one that isn’t afraid to poke fun at both itself and every other superhero film that has preceded it. Billy and Freddy are both well developed characters that carry the film very effectively, along with Zachary Levi’s antics in the role of Shazam.

Obviously, this is a superhero film and inevitably ends with superpowered characters hitting CGI monsters, but the film works best as a cross between a buddy comedy and a coming of age movie that just happens to have a superhero in it.