'Shazam!' Might Actually Be Able To Save DC Films

SHAZAM!

★★★

After the awfulness of the DC Snyderverse, in which the newly-minted DCEU was fashioned as home to brooding dudes, righteous bros, and a posturing cod-macho aesthetic that felt like a nü-metal video, Shazam! marks a radical reverse course. It’s a DCEU flick, but it feels a lot like an MCU one.

It’s fun, funny, irreverent, aware of its own ludicrousness; almost a meta-super-hero-movie. And, ultimately, its generic message runs counter to the brow-furrowing loners that’ve populated preceding DC flicks: it’s about finding a family and/or a gang of friends with which to belong.

Whilst there’s a whole opening act steeped in both origin-story mythos and formative childhood tragedies, Shazam! really comes to life in its second act, after its disobedient teenage lead (Asher Angel) has been blessed with the power to turn into a fully-grown adult super-hero (Zachary Levi, doing something similarly screwball to his great The Marvelous Mrs Maisel turn).

So, he and pal Jack Dylan Grazer — their names are Billy and Freddy, summoning the aw-shucks Americana of comic-book’s mid-20th-century boom— set out to find out what powers Shazam does and doesn’t have. When they get up to these hijinks in an abandoned factory, it’s reminiscent of Bart Simpson, factory owner. There’s also the classic shenanigans of kids eternal: this newfound access to a grown-up body providing access to beer-buying, school-skipping, and stripclub-visiting. The tone lands somewhere between Spider-man and Big, full of giddy, boyish enthusiasm for super-hero-dom; it actually telling that Shazam! ends with one of the great anthems of youthful rebellion: The Ramones’ cover of I Don’t Want To Grow Up.

In a more ‘gritty’ movie, the fact that the villain — Mark Strong as an evil-scientiest who can spit out CGI gargoyles representing the seven deadly sins — sucks ass would be an impediment. But, here, he’s treated as a joke, the whole thing a lark. All manner of super-hero tropes are made fun of, to disarming effect. The great running gag of the movie is a bunch of ‘trial’ names for a hero in search of an identity, which range from Zaptain America to Max Voltage to Captain Sparkle-fingers. 

And Shazam!’s own place within the DCEU is treated with as much sense of mockery. These means that, ultimately, the movie almost feels like an inside job, and a meta super-hero movie in more ways than one. If Shazam! is going to be the film to rescue the DCEU from a laughless realm of endless glowering, then first we all have to acknowledge just how bad Dawn Of Justice was.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

★★★1/2

“This isn’t even happening, it’s all just the expression of the death of imagination in the subconscious of an adolescent.” This is one of the many, many meta lines thrown around in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part; one that calls out the limits of the movie’s framing narrative, and of the symbolism that percolates through so many modern-day reboots pf beloved-childhood IP. This line is said during a fight between two characters both voiced by Chris Pratt, spoken by the one — Rex Dangerverse — that, as self-billed “galaxy-defender, archaeologist, cowboy and raptor trainer” is a gleeful parody of Pratt’s many leading-man commitments.

It’s all very jokey and in-jokey and fun, but pull away for a moment and take this all in: who would’ve expected Lego movies to become the cinematic seat of absurdist postmodernism? To usher in ongoing satirical takedowns of the tropes of movie-franchisedom, all whilst owing their existence to a giant corporation’s rapacious need to sell toys to kids?

A decade ago, the idea of a sequel to a movie spun off a pre-existing brand of plastic toy blocks would’ve been seen as sure symbol of the inexorable decline of filmmaking, the triumph of synergy over cinema. Yet, given that The Lego Batman Movie was infinitely superior to Batman v Superman, it’s hardly even surprising that The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part completely defies the dire expectations of its existence. Written, again, by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (oh, to have seen their Solo...), it’s a wild, ridiculous, joke-a-minute ride, an anarchic riff on runamok branding, the universation and ‘world-building’ of blockbuster cinema, and assorted pop-cultural stereotypes.

As two kids play with Lego, the action bounces between ‘Apocalypseburg’, a gritty, dust-strewn dystopia riffing on Mad Max and Blade Runner 2049, and ‘the Systar system’, an impossibly cutesy utopia of lovehearts and icecreams. The tale is at once familiar (there’s plots and fights) and kinda psychedelic (when the action plays with the layered narratives of ‘reality’ and the world of play, it’s more multi-layered than the new season of The OA).

There’s characters voiced by Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding. There’s a running cameo from a grizzled Bruce Willis. There’s a joke about Elliott Smith, and another about cinema’s various time-travel devices. A presumptive villain introduces herself with a song, Not Evil, in which she promises she isn’t harbouring a sinister plot beneath her welcoming front. Another jam, Catchy Song, features the endlessly repeated refrain, “This song’s gonna get stuck inside your head”. And how! Over the credits, whilst Beck and Robyn author more musical bubblegum, The Lonely Island bros rap about sticking around for the credit-roll, and the contributions of their favourite associate producers. At one point, mid-movie, Maya Rudolph — playing a mother in the framing-narrative real world — says “I’m not the bad guy in this story, I’m just an amusing side-character”.

It’s all so meta it sometimes threatens to collapse on itself, but that’s what makes it great. A sequel to a movie spun off a line of narrative-free plastic bricks shouldn’t be good, but that’s something Lord and Miller know all too well. The ridiculousness of this entire enterprise is made part of the movie, and The Second Part is all the better for it.

Dumbo

★★

A simple question: why does this remake of Dumbo exist? Yes, I’m all too aware that Disney is in the middle of making ‘live action’ (their words) remakes of classic titles, with Alice In Wonderland, Cinderella, Beauty In The Beast, and The Jungle Book in the rear-vision mirror, and Aladdin and The Lion King re-dos due imminently. But, beyond fulfilling a corporate-mandated brief built to fill release-sheets and spreadsheets, there’s no obvious artistic need, no raison d’être, for this new version.

Sure, it’s great that there’s no racially-problematic “Jim” crows this time around; and, given that the original 1941 animated Dumbo was only an hour long, there’s bountiful opportunity to expand on the story. But director Tim Burton — a once-beloved big-studio maverick who’s now synonymous with uninspired Hollywood products — uses the opportunity only to erect a whole new second-half of the film, its finale taking place in a retrofuturist steampunk world mashing up old-timey circuses/carnivals/World’s-Fairs with clattering contraptions and sinister Gothica (creating a place called Nightmare Island is clearly Burton’s favourite part of the movie).

Rather than being a simple tale about a single (unspeaking) character, there’s now a whole family saga tacked on; writer Ehren Kruger — who’s done hard time in the Transformers trenches — adding a human element to an animal story, yet not finding any real humanity, only clichés. A more inspired idea would’ve been burrowing deeper into the life, feelings, or psychology of its titular elephant, but instead this Dumbo is less about pachyderms, more about Colin Farrell as a dad returning from WWI, struggling to get over the recent death of his wife, and to reconnect with his children (Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins). There’s no musical numbers, this time, only indirect allusions to old songs, and a new soundtrack’d version of Baby Mine.

Those hoping to find a few glimmers of old Burton in Dumbo will find some in the presence of old Batman pals Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito; each of them chewing the scenery, offering performative antidotes to the anodyne work of the rest of the cast (Farrell shows so little emotional range you wonder if he’s gone gonzo, bringing Lanthimos deadpan into a family-movie setting). They’re each circus hucksters: DeVito a small-timer taking charge of a rundown rural troupe; Keaton a grand director of wild ambition and hubris, an antagonist who seems like one part Baz Luhrmann parody, one part comic riff on the Walt Disney myth.

Whilst there’s laughs to be had from each of their turns, their characters feel like uncomfortable mirrors for the movie: the moments in Dumbo in which they attempt to sell empty spectacle to the masses are what proves most illustrative of this enterprise.