‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ Did Not Make Me Furious, At the Very Least

April 11, 2023

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Look at how furious Shazam is! (CREDIT:
Warner Bros. Pictures/Screenshot)

Starring: Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Adam Brody, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, Rachel Zegler, Ross Butler, Ian Chen, D.J. Cotrona, Jovan Armand, Grace Caroline Currey, Meagan Good, Faithe Herman, Djimon Hounsou, Marta Milans, Cooper Andrews

Director: David F. Sandberg

Running Time: 130 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: March 17, 2023 (Theaters)

Shazam! Fury of the Gods reminded me of Wonder Woman 1984, both in terms of how it makes risky storytelling decisions, and also in terms of how Wonder Woman is in it. In the case of the WW follow-up, it was kind of inexplicable compared to the first outing. But in the case of the lightning bolt boy, the darkly kooky vibe was absolutely called for and precedented, it just didn’t work as well as it did the first time. But I’m still glad I watched it!

Grade: A Sort-Of Unicorn

‘Apollo 10½’ Sends a Kid to the Moon But Also Keeps Him Earthbound

March 30, 2022

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Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (CREDIT: Netflix)

Starring: Milo Coy, Jack Black, Josh Wiggins, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise, Natalie L’Amoreaux, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Sam Chipman, Danielle Guilbot, Glen Powell, Zachary Levi

Director: Richard Linklater

Running Time: 98 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Some Mildly Adult Moments

Release Date: April 1, 2022 (Netflix)

Isn’t it cool when kids do something that only adults are supposed to do? Well, maybe not all the time, at least not in the real world. Sure, a toddler dressing up like a doctor is so gosh darn cute, but that same toddler performing surgery is probably not the best idea. But we’re talking about fictional worlds right now! And that means that children can hold down dangerous jobs, and perform them quite admirably to boot. That brings me to the Richard Linklater-directed Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, a rotoscope-animated adventure in which a boy named Stanley (Milo Coy) is recruited by NASA to participate in the Apollo 11 mission. Now that’s some historical revisionism I can get behind.

In this alterna-vision of the 1960s, finding fresh astronauts is akin to the modern practice of college scouts traversing through middle schools to find the next big football or basketball phenom. A couple of NASA officials (Glen Powell, Zachary Levi) are hanging around a recess kickball game because one of the lunar modules is too small for adults and they’re hoping to find someone here who can fit in it. So they key right in on Stanley, and I’m all ready to go for some astronaut training montages. But not so quick, as that’s not exactly what Linklater has in mind. Instead, this is mostly a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about growing up in a big family in 1960s Texas, with the Space Race serving mostly as a background event. An important background event that sets the tone, but not the main event no matter how you slice it.

If Apollo 10½ had focused more on the child astronaut conceit, it would’ve been a lot more unique than what we actually ended up with. Instead, it’s a familiar piece of coming-of-age nostalgia from an oft-explored era. A well-made piece of familiar nostalgia, with compelling narration from Linklater vet Jack Black as adult Stanley, but decidedly familiar nonetheless. So just keep your expectations in check about the potential for freshness, and you should be able to find something to enjoy here.

Apollo 10½ is Recommended If You Like: 1960s fashion, 1960s TV shows, 1960 music

Grade: 3 out of 5 Lunar Modules

‘American Underdog’ is an Okay Football Movie and a Down-the-Middle Christian Movie

December 17, 2021

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American Underdog (CREDIT: Michael Kubeisy/Lionsgate)

Starring: Zachary Levi, Anna Paquin, Dennis Quaid, Chance Kelly, Cindy Hogan, Ser’Darius Blain, Adam Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Hayden Zaller

Directors: Andrew and Jon Erwin

Running Time: 112 Minutes

Rating: PG for Mild Adult Situations

Release Date: December 25, 2021 (Theaters)

Is American Underdog The Great Evangelical Christian Movie we’ve all been waiting for? Not quite, but it does promise a decent amount of inspiration. Plenty of professional athletes have attributed their success to God, and Kurt Warner is one of the most successful to ever do so. He was named Super Bowl MVP in 2001 and eventually made his way into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but he took a uniquely circuitous path to the big time. He went undrafted out of a college that’s not exactly known for producing NFL talent, got a job stocking grocery shelves just to get by, and then tried at hand arena football just as his dreams were starting to slip away for good. That’s when he landed on the radar of the St. Louis Rams, a struggling franchise willing to take a chance on a guy that everyone else had written off as too old to be a rookie. And even after all that, he was still just a backup. But not for long, as the Rams’ starting quarterback got injured in a preseason game.

You might think it would be a little odd seeing 41-year-old Zachary Levi playing Warner throughout his twenties, but fortunately Shazam! did us the favor of establishing his overgrown kid bona fides. Besides, world-class athletes are often so physically imposing and metaphorically larger-than-life that they can easily appear to be ten years older than they actually are. So Levi sells that part of the role, but what about the Christianity aspect? I certainly believe that Warner lives his life dedicated to God and that he became especially committed to his faith when he meets divorced mother of two Brenda (Anna Paquin). But does that aspect of his life make for an interesting movie? I’ll say this: it could’ve been more interesting. There are some hints at internal existential struggles, particularly when Brenda’s parents die in a tornado. But we never feel the full weight of how the Warners can reconcile a merciful god with a cruel world. We just kind of learn that they in fact do do that.

But what about the football? It’s not hard to make the career of Kurt Warner exciting. His years with the Rams were nicknamed “The Greatest Show on Turf,” and they certainly featured some of the most dynamic offensive playmaking in the history of the NFL. I love touchdowns much more than I love concussion-causing tackles, so I’m reasonably happy with a highlight reel of this nature. But does American Underdog say anything that the real licensed game footage doesn’t already say? As with the Christianity, the answer is a resounding … “maybe”? There’s a running theme about how Kurt is resistant to the strictures imposed by his coaches. Did he possibly revolutionize football by scrambling out of the so-called “pocket” and thereby opening up the game to untold possibilities? Perhaps! The movie doesn’t really give us a definitive answer either way.

Oh well, at least there’s Dennis Quaid really enjoying himself (and relishing a chicken sandwich when we first meet him) as Rams coach Dick Vermeil, who’s in his sixties during the film’s events but even more of an overgrown kid than everyone else. Maybe American Underdog should have just been a Warner-Vermeil buddy comedy – and not even necessarily primarily about football! Just spitballing, but perhaps they could solve pigskin-related crimes in the St. Louis area. Billion dollar idea here for the taking, folks.

American Underdog is Recommended If You Like: Real life sports footage mixed with fake movie scenes, Inspirational kids with disabilities, Honky tonk bars

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Touchdowns

‘The Mauritanian’ Gives Guantánamo Bay Detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi the Legal Thriller Treatment

February 10, 2021

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The Mauritanian (CREDIT: STX Films)

Starring: Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zachary Levi, Saamer Usmani

Director: Kevin Macdonald

Running Time: 129 Minutes

Rating: R, Mainly for a Scene of Intense Torture

Release Date: February 12, 2021

In the 2000s and early 2010s, films that grappled with 9/11 and its aftermath tended to be combat thrillers, reaching an apotheosis in terms of cultural impact with 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty. Now the focus has turned toward the War on Terror’s legal repercussions. 2019’s The Report took a deep dive into the massive amount of paperwork detailing the CIA’s use of post-9/11 torture, and now The Mauritanian comes along to narrow its attention on the particular case of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was detained at Guantánamo Bay withou charge for more than a decade. His story has been told before via the likes of 60 Minutes and Salahi’s own memoir, but even if you come in to this movie completely cold (as I more or less did), it’s immediately obvious that we are witnessing a miscarriage of justice.

There’s essentially zero doubt at any point in The Mauritanian about Salahi’s innocence. We’re not exactly told this outright, but we might as well be. With the guarded way that Tahar Rahim plays Salahi, there is a sense that he might be susceptible to being tricked into thinking that he has abetted terrorist activity. But these are merely survival tactics, as he mostly keeps his head down and says what is demanded of him when he absolutely has to so as to stay alive and sane enough to get by. The main source of the movie’s tension then is how much our patience is tested: just how long – in real time and movie time – will Salahi be detained? Because if you know anything about Guantánamo Bay, you know it’s probably going to take a while. Luckily, he has a couple of competent lawyers on his case in the form of Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) and Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), and with Foster giving off Hall of Fame-level tenacity vibes, we can feel confident that there will be a happy ending eventually.

Salahi’s story is undoubtedly compelling, but in terms of how it works as cinema, it’s not an automatic slam dunk. It mostly avoids indulging in the shoutiest excesses of miscarriage-of-justice legal procedurals, but it perhaps swings too far in the opposite direction, opting for a low-key approach that’s content to mostly just hum along. Then there are the torture scenes, which is something I would happily never see re-created on screen ever again. That’s not to say that it’s always absolutely wrong to portray torture; the ethics of doing so are certainly debatable. But aesthetically, it tends to be jarring and unnecessary, very much so in this case. Still, despite my misgivings, I’m glad that movies like The Mauritanian exist. The value they offer by getting these stories out to a wide audience generally outweigh my trepidations.

The Mauritanian is Recommended If You Like: The due process of law, Un-redacting the redactions

Grade: 3 out of 5 Forced Confessions

Movie Review: ‘Shazam!’ is a Blast of Kinetic and Frequently Disturbing Superhero Fun

April 3, 2019

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CREDIT: Warner Bros.

Starring: Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Mark Strong, Jack Dylan Grazer, Djimon Hounsou, Grace Fulton, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand, Faithe Herman, Cooper Andrews, Marta Milans

Director: David F. Sandberg

Running Time: 132 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Surprisingly Intense, Decently Scary Superhero Violence

Release Date: April 5, 2019

Shazam! harkens back to an era when superhero flicks, and the action-adventure genre generally, were legitimately scary. This is a movie in which a fair amount of people disintegrate, or get eaten by gargoyle-esque monsters, or get thrown out of windows hundreds of stories up. Seriously, this might set a record for most defenestrations in a PG-13 movie. I don’t mean to imply that the ostensibly family-friendly segment of the superhero genre has become otherwise toothless. The injuries and collateral damage are acknowledged in the likes of The Avengers (and overly fetishized in the likes of Man of Steel), but they are rarely this tangibly visceral. It’s been a while since the Penguin bit off someone’s nose in Batman Returns, but Shazam! has plenty of moments that are shocking on the same level, and that is mostly a good thing.

Those violent, sudden deaths hit as hard as they do because Shazam! is at first glance the height of boundless fun and bright colors. Its wish-fulfillment premise is that teenage boy Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is given the superpowers of an ancient wizard, which he accesses by shouting the title exclamation. This turns him into Zachary Levi in full-on beefcake form dressed in the most vibrant red and yellow with a lighting bolt on the front of his ensemble. Like most kids his age, Billy is nowhere near responsible enough to handle the weight of superherodom, which lends his adventures a “With great power comes great responsibility” vibe, but it’s a lot messier than the template set by Spider-Man. In his quest to exploit his powers for fame and fortune, Billy nearly kills a busful of people and panics so much in response that it is genuinely unclear if he can manage to fix his mistake and save them.

Lending a layer of tragedy to Shazam! is the fact that Billy and his main nemesis are both driven by an origin story of familial rejection. Billy was accidentally separated at a young age from his mother at a carnival, and he has spent the ensuing years running away from foster homes in an attempt to reunite with her. Meanwhile, Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong) grew up an emotionally abused outcast in his wealthy family. He was once considered a candidate to receive the Shazam powers, and he has spent decades attempting to rediscover the wizardly realm, primarily so that he can exact some extremely disproportionate revenge. It’s not too hard to imagine that in a parallel universe, Billy could grow up to be as terrifying as Thaddeus, but luckily he has the strength of his newest foster family to help carry him along. Amidst all the very real danger, Shazam! would very much like us to recognize the importance of a loving support system no matter what our level of superpowers.

Shazam! is Recommended If You Like: Spider-Man, Batman Returns, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Finger Lightning Bolts