Review - Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Directed by: James Mangold
Written by: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller
Starring: Matt Damon, Christian Bale
IMDb Link

There's a reason the "Classic Underdog Story" is a Classic.

Carroll Shelby (Damon) and Ken Miles (Bale) are two men who don't want to change. Shelby's a former racer whose hypertension means his early retirement in to sales and management. Miles is an extraordinarily talented racer who self-describes as "difficult" with people and whose financial trouble means that he has to give up his passion. Fortunately for them, when Ford needs people to build and race a car that can beat Ferrari at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Man endurance race, Shelby's clout gets them both noticed and quickly working with a blank check to do what they do best and hope that it's enough. The story also layers in colourful human drama, as every corporate suit with an opinion tries to force the men to compromise their work; they may be good men with a passion for racing, but they are unambiguously working for bad men who want to sell cars, caring more about corporate imagery.

For the most part, the story is exactly as expected at every turn; each twist and turn a staple of the sort of story this movie is trying to tell, from the perfectly timed complications with the vehicle, to the moments when Miles' aforementioned "difficulty" creates problems for him with the suits, while Shelby tries to balance appeasing them and working with Miles' pure racing ideals. Thankfully, this movie is also fantastically put together, so it gets away with playing each and every story beat as it does because it knows why these stories work and why they're worth telling, and it makes the few moments that aren't expected (such as Miles' wife being just as mad as he is in the best way) feel earned and meaningful, like the they couldn't quite fit in to the molds of the tropes so they were left  in because they were genuine. The human drama both on and off the track is so thoroughly well told that it hardly matters if you can see each turn a mile off, and a lot of that has to do with the performances.

Damon is a perfect fit for Shelby, giving a very human performance as he navigates the his own morals through the amorality of the corporate world, and he's just cheeky enough to not be a total straight man. Bale is a bit more animated than Damon, offering a small but noticeable contrast that's reminiscent of some of his best work, a single-minded person expressed through his eccentricities and the bonds he shares with the people he loves: the best scenes are his, from his introduction to quiet moments with his son, to the sheer elation he shares with only himself in the car as he tries to navigate and understand his own emotions. Other characters are one-note but effectively performed, particularly Josh Lucas as Leo Beebe, a smarmy executive who acts as a constant thorn in the sides of Shelby and Miles. the embodiment of the corporate pressure our heroes face, one dimensional but too infuriating to be forgotten.

What's really memorable about the film, between all the human drama that propels the story, is the racing. There's an immersion to it, the way the engines roar electrifies the body and the camera's constant weaving between cars as it tracks Miles' every step towards victory glue the eyes to the screen, searching as Miles does for each opening, feeling the heart skip a beat as the brakes screech as he tears around each corner or dodges another pile up. It's incredibly well directed action, and more importantly it ties back in to the investment in Miles as a character, these scenes not just banking on the stakes it sets up but also allowing us a few moments to understand a man who seems to have trouble understanding himself.

The Short Version: It's as excellently crafted as it is comfortable, telling a familiar story of men triumphing in the face of the impossible, backed by understated performances, incredibly immersive racing sequences, and an incredibly wholesome bond between men who can't change. It's the perfect movie to take your dad to see.

Rating: 8/10

Review - Knives Out (2019)

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans
IMDb Link

Just as Rian Johnson's first film, Brick, celebrated the noir genre through a near-perfect reconstruction with a modern twist, Knives Out is a reminder of what makes mystery stories so fun and engaging, while updating the genre fare with a couple of brilliant and quirky ideas.

A rich murder mystery writer has slit his throat, but an anonymous client seems to think that there's more to this than suicide, and the eccentric detective (Craig) they've hired seems to agree, especially since every member of this man's avaricious family could be a suspect. To say more would be to give away too much of the story, and as it's a mystery that ruins the fun, but I do want to talk about a couple of things that may enter spoiler territory, so if you want to go in to the story unfettered by more, just skip to my summary and know that I absolutely recommend this film as one of the best of the year.

What makes Knives Out so utterly engaging is its choice of perspective: both whose we view the movie from and how such things can change. On its own, such a story would only be genre-savvy, but we see the story outside the perspective of the detective: the audience surrogate seems also the perpetrator, and such a decision elevates the film to new heights as it plays such a revelation both for tension and for humour in Johnson's own delightfully off-kilter way. But this idea of perspective shifting the meaning of the story gets taken even further in some of the film's more subtle touches. I love the way each family member, when telling the story of their father's birthday, imagine themselves by their father's side as the cake is placed in front of him, how treating his nurse as "one of the family" to some is little more than using them as an example as they postulate some racist tirade, to how nobody seems to be clear on where said nurse is even from, or who actually voted to not let her attend the funeral. The stories are so deliberately inconsistent, and while it can sometimes feel like very clever window dressing, it all ultimately plays back in to the key themes of the story.

All of this is of course helped immensely by the hammy, archetypal performances of the colourful cast. Everyone here commits to the slightly ridiculous and yet inalienable humanity of their characters; the family is filled with terrible people who behave excessively, but they're always strangely believable. I'd be here all day if I talked about every one of them, so know that each of them is worth talking about while I get in to a couple of my favourites. Jamie Lee Curtis is a highlight here as the eldest daughter, a delight to watch in the most extra of pink power suits, at once the apotheosis of all the greed and power-mongering that runs in the family, and yet the most clearly stricken by the death of her father. Her son, played by Chris Evans, is the most vindictive, uncaring, brutally sarcastic dickhead, and he definitely seems to be having the most fun in what is the second-most entertaining performance in the film. The only one that bests him is Craig's detective, Benoit Blanc, whose hilariously silly caricature of an accent is the mere icing on the doughnut of a man who simply cannot stop talking them by film's end; his is the purest form of puzzling joy that this movie goes for. That said, Ana de Armas is the heart and soul of this movie, her performance the closest to real to keep the audience in her head-space, with the clever juxtaposition of the flaws and strengths of her character reinforcing her most important moments: her caring and her inability to lie seen as weakness by the rest, the perfect foil to keep people on her side and yet perfectly inept to deal with this situation, and Armas handles each challenge excellently.

The Short Version: Cleverly written and masterfully framed, Knives Out supports a colourful cast of characters with a rollicking mystery story whose originality lies in its style of telling, twisting as much with its use of perspective as it does with its dizzying plot.

Rating: 8.5/10

Review - Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Written by: Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
IMDb Link

Zombieland was one of the best pieces of Zombie fiction to come out of that glut of content the subgenre received in the late 2000s-early 2010s; the "Double Tap" became a meme, the actors all went on to have prestige careers. Before all that, though, the film was wickedly funny, and the running trope commentary felt like a breath of fresh air as the content began to pile up around the subgenre like dead bodies.

Unfortunately, it's been ten years; Zombie content has continued to shamble on, the commentary of the first has grown stale, and Zombieland: Double Tap seems content to spend its time remembering how good the first one was rather than doing anything to really move the story or the characters forward.

It's been 10 years in Zombieland as well, and now Tallahassee (Harrelson), Columbus (Eisenberg), Wichita (Stone) and Little Rock (Breslin) have moved in to the White House. Comfort and close quarters has strained the family, and it's not long before Wichita and Little Rock hit the road again, only for Wichita to return when Little Rock takes off with a hippy poser (Avan Jogia). Meanwhile, Tallahassee and Columbus come across a dumb blonde stereotype named Madison (Zoey Deutch), whose only role in the story seems to be to play to the stereotype and sleep with Columbus to create some easy tension between Columbus and Wichita. The rest is a fairly fun road trip movie that includes a stop-off with Tallahassee's counterpart Nevada (Rosario Dawson) at an Elvis-themed hotel, and a few new types of zombie that only really fill in a couple of gags.

There's nothing here that's particularly bad, but none of it's particularly good either. The laughs aren't as consistent, the new characters aren't anywhere near as funny as the filmmakers seem to think they are, and the theme are basically the same as the first, but replace the word "family" with the word "home" as a roundabout way of getting the characters essentially back to where they started. As the same time, the film is incredibly comfy: references to the first are always welcome and even make for some of the better bits in the movie, and the jokes that aren't funny also aren't aggressively unfunny. The whole experience is very easy to lean back with and somewhat enjoy, and it's rarely less than that, but also never more than that.

The Short Version: Like warmed up leftovers of really nice meal: you know you've had this exact meal but better, and yet there's not much to complain about.

Rating: 6/10

Review - 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Written by: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Sophie Nelisse, Corinne Foxx, Brianne Tju, Sistine Stallone
IMDb Link

I'm pretty indiscriminate when it comes to creature features, especially shark movies, so if you're like me and you're always up for a slightly trashy shark movie that's clearly seen a lot of other shark movies, you'll probably find this somewhat entertaining.

The movie is essentially The Descent, but worse and with sharks. Two step-sisters are having a hard time adjusting to one another in their new home in Mexico, so they escape with a couple of friends to a secret watering hole that has an ancient Mayan temple recently discovered beneath. The girls go to explore the temple, things gets claustrophobic, and one of them accidentally causes a collapse that traps them in the temple, so they have to explore further to find another way out, while discovering that they are in the territory of a breed of Great White Shark that has evolved to use sound over sight.

The story actually 'works' in the sense that it has a very on-the-nose setup and obvious theme: the sisters aren't getting along (each of them very pointedly says "she's not my sister" within the first ten minutes of the movie) so they have to learn to work together to survive. It's also surprisingly coherent with the first movie's focus on sisterhood as an inalienable bond. Unfortunately, little else is developed, with characters so shallow they can't even be called archetypes; even the one that's supposed to be aggressively unlikable due to their selfishness doesn't have any real energy to her. I'm not asking for much, but you'd think a film that so aggressively pulls ideas from The Descent would also try the whole "likable and sympathetic characters" thing a little harder instead of gratuitously using slow-motion to pad out the running time like a Zack Snyder film. But I digress, this is a shark movie, so I'll talk about the horror.

There's exactly one scare in this movie that's absolutely masterful in its craft. Shortly after one of the girls knocks over a large pillar and causes a massive flood of silt in the water, blinding everyone and cutting off their radio connections. We're stuck alone with the main character, who turns about frantically as she looks for her friends and fumbles with her light. As it flashes around in the water, it shines behind her, and for the briefest moment of complete silence, we see the blind shark pass by. It's an absolutely chilling moment that carries with it no fanfare, and just let's you sit with the knowledge of the horror that could be befall her, as she continues to struggle and search. The tension is set and held when she finds a couple of her friends, now she thinks she's safe, and that dissonance with what the audience knows is exactly the sort nail-biting horror that elevates these sort of films, even as the poor writing highlights who's going to die by how little time has actually been spent developing them. This one moment, the follow-up, and the eventual release of the earned jump-scare is better than everything else in the movie by a mile, even the scene that lifts its ideas directly from The Land Before Time V (seriously; I wish I could find the scene to draw a comparison). The rest of the time this movie goes for horror it quickly gets repetitive, to the point that many of the shots feel exactly the same as the girls scramble from one tunnel the shark is too big to swim through to another, and the impact the sounds these girls make have on the sharks become more and more inconsistent.

The Short Version: Uncaged reaches all the way up to the lofty heights of slightly better than the original. It's contrived but functional, cliche but genre-savvy, and its few excellent scares are drowned out by repetition.

Rating: 5/10

Review - Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Directed by: Tim Miller
Written by: David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray, James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee
Starring: Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger
IMDb Link

The Terminator movies hadn't really had a good movie since 1991. T3 is a fine action movie that throws away the best story elements of T2; Terminator: Salvation is better than people give it credit for but between the drab colour and poor direction the action never feels particularly engaging; Terminator: Genisys is monumentally bad despite trying something interesting with the time-travel stuff, never actually making sense of any concept it comes up with and messing up almost everything it tries. Needless to say, I was not excited for Dark Fate, which is why I found it all the more surprising that I came out of it ready to recommend it.

The movie opens by literally killing John Connor. It's a ballsy move that failed spectacularly in Genisys, but here it's not done for a cheap twist villain; it reforges Sarah (Linda Hamilton) meaningfully as a character (and conveniently brings Arnie back in to the story) in to a tired, wounded version of the savage mama bear she was in T2. While that brings her back in to the story, the plot itself focuses once again on an old comfort zone: two cyborgs come back in time to kill someone that's important in the future, with the particulars swapped around a bit. The good robot (Mackenzie Davis) is actually an augmented human named Grace, the bad robot (Gabriel Luna) is nanoliquid over an exoskeleton so it can sometimes be two robots and is as generally indestructible as the T-1000 was in T2, and the new target, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), is important a new future that was created when they stopped Skynet at the end of T2 (turns out they go on to make something that's not demonstrably different from Skynet anyway; this time it's called Legion). The differences are a little convoluted and the film has to dedicate a couple of scenes of exposition back-to-back, which drags the pacing down in the middle; the film also makes about as many references to T2 as I just did for everything it sets up. That said, the broad strokes are as familiar as the twists are expected, so while the film does dull its experience at points trying to evoke the same horror at humanity's annihilation as its predecessors, the throughline of exactly what the characters are doing and why is never lost.

What's more is that aside from the exposition dump the film manages to keep its focus on the characters and the action, which are the film's two biggest strengths. Hamilton's performance as Sarah is excellent; she manages to be as much of a stone-cold badass as she ever was, and yet evokes a sad reflection of who she once was, a soldier who fights now because her purpose was taken from her. Seriously, I'll give credit to everyone else in a second, but Sarah as a character is easily the most tragic here, and Hamilton is capable of expressing every single wound in her soul while never forgetting how strong she is. Meanwhile, the best new character in this movie is Davis' Grace; she evokes a single-minded desperation juxtaposed against her powerful frame, her strength and her speed betrayed by her fear, a rabid need to protect that which means the most to her. It's very much in the same vein as Kyle Reese in the original, and when considered alongside her augmentations, she essentially gets to play the role of both sorts of protectors we've seen; an attempt to have a character that can do the action scenes of T2 but play the emotional beats of the original. Dani sometimes feels more like a prop than a character, and Reyes sometimes feels a little wooden in her performance, but these factors are mostly remedied in the final act, where she sort of has an arc and Reyes at least hits the right emotions due her character's climax. Arnie's role as yet another T-800 who grew a conscience (this one's named Carl) is one that I feel I'm not capable of criticising; it's Arnie, he's a hero to me, I'd just end up running in circles trying to explain all the ways in which he's great even though his acting has never been his strong suit. Gabriel Luna is a surprise hit here as the new evil Terminator (a "Rev-9" model): his character blends perfectly, even switching up accents at key points to put people at ease, and at the same time his approach in the action scenes is completely animalistic; he's ferocious, unyielding, and the perfect reminder of why the Terminators are so scary, and yet so robotic in his programming that he'll make mistakes when his target is in sight.

This speaks to the credit of everyone who worked on the action sequences as well. The scenes with the Rev-9 do an excellent job of showing just how unstoppable he feels, but also how he can be stymied and even defeated. Likewise, Grace is a revelation when she comes up against him; the two are in an ever-escalating arms race with one another, as she constantly weaponises her environment and he uses his abilities to adapt. These fights have a rhythm, a pulse-pounding pace that to some genuinely jaw-dropping moments of pure action. This gets taken a step further when Arnie gets thrown back in to the mix, his own simple brute force contrasted with the fast and fierce fighting styles of the others with sheer weight; he's theoretically outclassed, but hits harder than either of them, and it all builds to a brilliantly choreographed final fight, where Grace and Arnie's strengths are played together with such measured harmony that you briefly forget about all the heavy exposition, all the bad dialogue, the twist so poorly hidden it baffles as to why they tried, or the way this movie feels overcrowded, and just revel in some truly well-done action. That's what makes this movie the only good sequel to T2: the action feels like something out of one of James Cameron's films, and it works so well that the film's shortcomings fall by the wayside in its most important moments. 

The Short Version: "The best Terminator movie since T2" isn't exactly a high bar when you look at every other Terminator movie, but that same look will show you just how much better Dark Fate is. Its action scenes are exhilarating, its characters and performances poignant (if not a little hammy due to dialogue), and its story not nearly as convoluted as it could have been; it never reaches the heights of its classic predecessors, but between these core strengths, the movie is surprisingly and consistently engaging.

Rating: 7/10

Published November 4th, 2019

Film Review: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Directed by: Michael Dougherty
Written by: Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields, Max Borenstein
Starring: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown
IMDb Link

I've been a massive fan of Godzilla ever since I was a kid. I mean, what's not to love about a giant, indestructible dinosaur with atomic fire breath? That said, I feel a bit like a victim of my own hype for this film. In a lot of ways, this is the Godzilla film I've wanted to see for the past five years, but the parts of the film that didn't work for me felt amplified by the standards I held to the parts that did. I'm probably going to be harder on this movie than I should because of this, so just know that I recommend this movie: It's Godzilla, I love him, any and all of his movies should be watched.

Five years after the events of Godzilla (2014), the world is still grappling with the idea that monsters exist, and that the secret government organisation Monarch has been hiding that fact for a long time. Struck by the death of their son amidst the chaos caused by Godzilla and his adversaries, Mark (Chandler) and Emma Russell (Farmiga), key members of Monarch, go their separate ways to deal with their grief, Mark abandoning Monarch altogether and Emma burying deeper in to her work, and bringing her daughter Maddy (Brown) with her. More giant monsters have been discovered slumbering beneath the Earth, labelled "Titans", and their discovery allows Emma to create the Orca, a machine that can communicate with them, which becomes a problem when Eco-Terrorist, Jonah Alan (Charles Dance) wants to use it to awaken the Titans and destroy humanity.

It's an awfully convoluted excuse to get Godzilla to fight more monsters, particularly his biggest classic adversary, King Ghidorah, a three-headed golden dragon that breathes lightning. If that's all you're here for, then you'll get it, but you'll have to do a seemingly inordinate amount of waiting.

It's not that there's a lot going on between the fights, it's just that what's going on between the fights is a bit of a slog to get through because it's slow and messy and unfocused. Character motivations are always vague and don't hold any emotional weight because they largely go unexplored, there's a big spiel made about restoring balance to the planet that rings hollow because it's not what either of the characters fighting for that actually want. It's not like the performers are bad, either, they just don't have much to work with in terms of actual character material. Farmiga and Chandler both play their grief with genuine pathos, each of them doing their best to verbally and emotionally communicate the journeys of their characters, but that's them making the most out of what they're given. Dance's Alan also gets to be a wonderful screen presence that has essentially nothing meaningful to say, dropping a bit of verbal evisceration and then leaving the movie when he's no longer useful.

Then there's a constant tightrope walk between showing the military as incapable and showing them as altruistic; no matter what the situation, the soldiers are shown to be self-sacrificing to a fault, and yet they're also always the butt of many a macabre joke. It feels like the movie is trying to both call back to the classic "military is useless" trope that is so prevalent in the Godzilla series, but can't help find ways to undermine that trope. This itself is more a distillation of one of the film's more pervasive issues, its tonal inconsistency. The film is constantly undercutting its human moments with humour, and while that can work, it's never clever here; when the moment Ghidorah gets named is cut short by someone saying "I think she said 'gonorrhea'", it nibbles away at the film's weight, which is itself predicated on the deification of these big monsters.

Speaking of which, enough complaining; this is a Kaiju movie, any and all misgivings about the film can be ignored if the pure spectacle of giant monsters fighting is appropriately spectacular, and it's not like the human side of the story was a total waste.

The fights in this movie are incredible. The monsters are given such power, such weight, that the act of them clashing causes shockwaves, flying over a city causes its utter destruction, and simply existing causes unparalleled storms. These beings and their wondrous extravaganza are the product of pure imagination, a lifetime of thinking about how these monsters would look and act if given the blockbuster treatment brought to life in the biggest way possible. There's no way to truly express in written word how good the action is here, it's better explained by a kid smashing toys together, that's the only way to understand the utter joy that takes place on screen.

There's also more to the monsters than just their fights, each of them is given real personality that accentuates their actions; they are less monsters and more animals who think they're people, blown up to gargantuan performances. There's Godzilla, of course, whose indestructible exterior belies a soft heart and intelligence; the main character's arc is completed under the premise that he can believe that Godzilla is more than a monster, and it works entirely because of how much effort they put in to anthropomorphising the big lizard. Ghidorah gets three distinct personalities among his heads; the left-most being bullied by the middle head is the sort of little character tick that didn't need to happen for the sake of a fight, but it adds so much to make the big guy feel 'real' despite being something as silly as a three-headed golden dragon. Rodan is similarly realised, his cockiness and side-switching tendencies being the sort of things that make him the Starscream of the Godzilla Monsterverse. Then there's Mothra, the best thing in this movie that isn't named Godzilla. She's such a kind a gracious thing; even when she's being manipulated to hurt people the most she can do is throw them in to soft webbing, and yet she's just as much an absolute ruler as the rest of them going toe to toe with Rodan despite the fact that she's a giant moth and he's a giant pterodactyl made of fire.

The work that went in to making these ridiculously silly creatures work as emotionally engaging characters is a testament to how much the people working on this film love the material. This is just as present in the soundtrack as anywhere else; the music is a modern realisation of so many classic pieces, the original Godzilla themes getting updates that turn them from melancholic orchestral pieces in to triumphant battle cries, and everyone's little leitmotifs getting their place within this overcrowded movie. It's clear that there's a lot of love and passion poured in to this movie, and while that's obvious in the way the monsters move and fight, there is one moment within the film that I think best reflects the respect with which they were trying to approach this story.

Late in to the film, Godzilla is gravely injured, and the only way to revive him for one last fight is with a nuke. The man that goes down in to the ocean with the nuke to revive him, Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), ruminates on the need to make peace with the demons that create our wounds. It's an obvious metaphor for Mark to consider as he tries to reconcile playing a part in saving Godzilla when he's spent so much time wanting Godzilla dead, but this goes deeper than that. Godzilla started as a metaphor for the ravages of atomic warfare, the literal embodiment of the pain and horror that so many Japanese people had to experience, and yet his success has turned him in to a pop culture icon in Japan, and a cult icon across the world. The final moments of the very first Godzilla film had a Dr. Serizawa dive down in to the ocean with the intent to kill Godzilla, and 65 years later, we have a Dr. Serizawa dive down in to the ocean to save him. It's a beautiful reflection of how Godzilla has fundamentally changed over time in the cultural consciousness, a love letter to everything he has meant since his inception. This isn't the best Godzilla movie, or his most well told story, but in moments like these, the intent is clear, and it's impossible not to feel the adoration the filmmakers have for the King of the Monsters.

The Short Version: The film is so well visually realised that it demands to be seen on a big screen, and the symbolic weight behind it is a treat for fans, but even some of the film's best moments aren't given their full impact because of a pervasive and uneven human story that never feels as alive as the monsters.

Rating: It's still frickin' GODZILLA /10

Published June 2nd, 2019

Film Review: Shazam! (2019)

Directed by: David F. Sandberg
Written by: Henry Gayden, Darren Lemke
Starring: Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer
IMDb Link

Strike me with lightning if DC hasn't finally made a superhero movie in this era worthy of being called great.

14-year old troubled foster child Billy Batson (Angel) is looking for his birth mother, running from every home he's put in and getting himself in to a lot of trouble along the way. After being taken in by the last family who would, and a brief moment of heroism, he is called upon by an ancient wizard to take up super powers in the body of the ancient champion, Shazam (Levi, and basically Superman but with lightning powers). If that sounds goofy and dumb to you, that's only because it is, and the film revels in this without ever mocking it.

The film takes so much of that which is taken for granted in superhero stories today, the origin story, and imbues it with newfound enthusiasm. It tries its hardest to breeze through the clunky exposition as quickly as possible, and shifts right to the focus on the characters and their reactions to such an event. Billy's new foster brother Freddy is a superhero fanboy, and the two of them work together to figure out exactly what Billy can do, and exploit it in every way you would expect of a teenager that's given super powers and made to look like an adult; drinking beer, pulling pranks on bullies, uploading viral videos, etc. Everything is executed with the exact glee that's needed to make such a rote part of these sorts of stories fun and engaging; there's a real joy to watching this film because of how genuine the reactions of Freddy and Billy are to all that's happening, and the silliness of the mischief they get up to because they're just teens.

Part of this is in Levi's performance, of course, who imitates Angel's Batson seamlessly as Shazam, a constant excitement flowing through him that only adds to the pure happiness that this movie exudes, and it contrasts so well with the film's darker and grittier moments, of which there are a surprising amount. This film is definitely targeted at younger audiences, but it's not afraid to let things get scary when it needs to, while also throwing some hard-hitting emotional punches that I really wasn't sure the movie's gusto would allow it to pull off, but the film lands these moments largely because they flow with the film's narrative and contrast the emotions of superhero conflict with normal human conflict so strongly. Billy is just a kid who wants to find his mum, and even in the midst of superhero conflicts and familial conflicts, this thread is never lost, it feeds in to the other narratives, either explicitly or thematically, and as a result the film can reduce itself down to the quietest of sombre moments before finishing in one of the loudest and most smile-inducing ways possible, and all of it fits together.

That finish is perfect, by the way. I wouldn't dare to spoil it, but everything about the climax is so wonderful that I would need another review to go over it properly. It's not just great, it puts every other superhero finale of the last decade to shame.

The Short Version: Shazam! taps in to what superhero stories are about in a way that's delightfully goofy, heartwarming, and giddy with excitement. It's an outstanding example of how embracing a story meant for kids can make you feel like one again.

Rating: Go watch it right now/10

Published April 7th, 2019