On Monday afternoon, April 8th, 2019 I had no intention on going to the AMC 12 movie theater. I was tired and famished from a physically grueling soccer practice so I initially declined an offer to go see Shazam that night. After a lot of convincing and a realization that I kind of wanted to see the movie, I decided to go with some friends to see Shazam.

Going into the movie I expected a light-hearted comedy with little to no interesting plot points. I was generally wrong about this assumption. Broadly speaking the movie was an action/comedy superhero movie. Before watching Shazam I expected it to be completely family friendly with a pg-13 rating because of some villain vs hero action scenes. I was wrong from the beginning.

The movie begins with a dark scene showcasing a dark family tragedy mixed together with some slight child emotional abuse. The main villain Dr. Sivana, is a twisted man who is everything you would expect from a superhero movie villain. He is a dark-minded character with a tragic past and a thirst for power. He isn’t the most creative villain in the way that he has the same exact powers as Shazam making their inevitable fight scenes nothing too special. The part is still played well and the characters of Billy Batson and Shazam himself (who are the same person, but not at the same time) are done perfectly.

Shazam’s immaturity is shown at the beginning of the film, by him only doing things like charging peoples cell phones and putting on lighting shows for cash. After all, Shazam is actually a 14 year old orphan runaway so this is a convincing act by the character argued to be as strong as Superman. Even with the pleasing fight scenes and dark murderous tone carried by Dr. Sivana there is still plenty of room in the film for comedy. Many of the characters besides the three or four main characters are obviously comic relief, but that’s okay because they are actually funny.

Overall Shazam was an entertaining movie with a lot of unexpected aspects to it. Its plot wasn’t extremely predictable or basic (even though it wasn’t extremely great) so overall I give Shazam a (7/10).