Shazam!

I watched the Saturday morning show as a kid, and I don’t remember much. A hippie in an orange shirt drove around in a Winnebago with an old man and they saved people and fought crime. Modern Shazam doesn’t have a creepy old man or a Winnebago, and he’s less about saving people and more about stopping this one really bad guy and the hideous demons he flies around with. It’s hard to understand the villain’s plan. He goes into a boardroom and kills all the top members of a company so he can run the company? I’m not sure that’s how corporate hierarchies work. There is a light-hearted, kid-friendly vibe to this. Early in the movie, when Zachary Levi is in the suit and doing the comedy thing, it’s crowd-pleasing and jaunty. Inevitably, there’s a bunch of superhero fighting, none of which is really original, visually or thematically. It almost feels extracted from the DC/WB tv show playbook, rather than the big-budget movies. Which is not a bad thing. There’s a reason why those shows have the staying power.