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.

A Vigilante

The are several instances when Olivia Wilde’s vigilante Equalizer has the drop on the evil man, and for reasons that are unclear, she doesn’t break his neck. So, there’s a lot of wish-fulfillment, and a lot of simplifying of complicated themes about abuse, but there isn’t a lot of killin’. And there’s needs to be more killin’. It’s not like the lady isn’t ready. She spends about 25% of this movie “training” – punching and exercising in shitty hotel rooms. Kill a motherfucker or two, lady! Quit pulling punches.

Hotel Mumbai

Of all the Die Hard knock-offs we’ve seen over the years, it turns out all we had to do to get the best one was wait for the “true story” version. It’s a very well-directed, taught and tense action movie based on true events in 2008. The international cast is top-notch, doing their best with their action movie archetypes.
The setting, whether it’s sets or locations, feels authentic and carefully designed. The pace is expertly persistent. In so many ways, it feels like a good, old-fashioned action movie. If John McClane was a Sikh. It’s hard to know how accurate it is, and it dramatizes the terrorists and their motives in a way that might be more cinematic than realistic. But it IS a movie – and movies do that. So, I say: kudos and huzzahs to the filmmakers.

The Mustang

What’s striking about this is: as much as the main character must bond with a wily horse, the actor must also bond with the horse actor. That had to have taken lots of time and dedication. Overall, it’s a pleasant but dull prison-western driven by themes of captivity and rehabilitation. It’s never ham-fisted or insincere, but it also plays it pretty safe in most of the scenes – checking the “family film” box, which is funny because it’s rated R. See it if you like horses.