Hero Go Again: SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS

There’s something charmingly small about Shazam! Fury of the Gods. It’s not a mindlessly bombastic superhero picture taking place entirely in a multiverse or among incomprehensible sliding scales of cosmic cause and effect in which entire galaxies hang in the balance and there’s nary a normie around. Instead it is about a few teenagers and the fate of…Philadelphia. There’s even a scene where the heroes save innocent bystanders from a collapsing bridge and, later, chase monsters away from fearful crowds of fleeing onlookers. When’s the last time you saw that? Small wonders. The movie itself has the kind of dopey adolescent charm you’d expect from a superhero movie, and its makers load it up with the generic moves and slippery genre play—monsters and Gods and heroes, with mild horror and teen comedy elements jostling around, too—that pass the time for its target audience of 12-year-olds. Director David F. Sandberg knows how to frame a sequence and linger on some earnest character moments, juggling a bright kid-friendly tone with harsher fantasy violence. And when the movie’s somehow both sometimes-convoluted and cut-to-the-bone plot bumbles smoothly along, there’s passable entertainment here.

This belated sequel to a 2019 DC comics adaptation continues the story of a teenage boy who is gifted with superpowers. The scrawny foster kid (Asher Angel) just has to shout “Shazam!” to be instantly transformed into a broad caricature of a Superman (Zachary Levi). All these years later, though, and there’s some fun to be had in watching the disjunction between these two performances, especially as Angel is basically an adult now and a subplot concerns his anxieties about aging out of the foster system. You see, he’s found a nice, welcoming family full of foster siblings who, if you recall the previous film, have also been Shazamed and can zap into muscular superpowered hotties at will. That gives the movie a nice backdrop of family togetherness. (I wish there was even more for the kids to do, but the family’s incorporation into the finale is once again a funny, and heartwarming, touch.) It has stock villains—angry Ancient Greek goddesses (Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren)—swanning in looking to reclaim the Shazam powers. Turns out the kindly wizard (Djimon Hounsou, here doing ace comic relief, a fine respite from his usual villainous typecasting of late) stole their father’s powers to give to these kids. Oops. So it’s a super-powered fight for the right to fly faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound. It feels cut tightly and constrained by its smallness at times, but that very smallness makes the aw-shucks charms of its teen-centric story play all the more shaggily appealing. It feels exactly like the sort of amiable matinee effort that I would’ve loved as a kid, back when these sort of movies weren’t out every month.

Long Beautiful Hair: TANGLED

Disney’s latest animated feature is Tangled, a retelling of the story of Rapunzel, the princess with the incredibly long golden hair. The film’s a straight-up fairy tale, no apologies. It doesn’t feel the need to wink at the audience, distancing itself from the formula for cheap gags or in a bid for elusive contemporary coolness. That kind of hedging and equivocating has infected not just Disney films, but many animated family films in the last decade. There was a rush to learn from Pixar’s example by using computer animation, while overlooking the true strengths of Pixar: sincerity and simple emotion, the same qualities that Disney itself once knew by heart.

With Tangled, Disney finds its way back to its sweet spot, building on last year’s good first step with Princess and the Frog. Their latest film is sweet and charming. It’s not exactly innovating, but it’s fresh and surprisingly powerful. In Dan Fogelman’s script, Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) has been locked in a tower for her entire childhood. The evil Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) has raised her as her daughter after kidnapping the infant princess. You see, Rapunzel’s hair is a fountain of youth. Now, on the precipice of adulthood, Rapunzel yearns to explore the outside world. Of course, for all this time, the king and queen have been searching for their missing daughter. Gothel knows that to let Rapunzel leave the tower would mean to lose youth forever.

The film is filled with rich mother issues. It’s essentially a stand-off between an old view of femininity that tells women to stay locked in a domestic setting, useful only for their physical qualities, and a modern view of women as complete, resourceful individuals of great inherent worth, with talents and insights well worth sharing with the outside world. Rapunzel’s small, personal rebellion against her “mother” consists of secretly cultivating myriad talents. Gothel knows the girl paints, bakes, reads, thinks, and dreams (for starters), but does she know how well? And does she even begin to realize the girl’s potential? She keeps Rapunzel captive by subtly undermining her self-esteem. The film sits on this conflict, deepened by the sense of awful betrayal at the center. Rapunzel has a love for this maternal figure that is painfully sad to us in the audience, aware as we are of the kidnapping.

Dropping into the tower to complicate the plot is Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi), a thief who, by ditching his thuggish partners-in-crime (Ron Perlman), has just barely escaped the royal guards chasing him. To Rapunzel he represents both a novelty and an opportunity. He is the outside world and all the promise and danger that entails. She talks him into escorting her outside the tower, so together they climb down, kicking off a plot that is a well-oiled machine consisting of various overlapping chases. Mother Gothel’s on the hunt for Rapunzel while two groups, both the royal guards and the cheated thugs, are on the trail of Flynn. The film develops into a bright and sunny chase picture with plenty of funny little detours and zippy, exciting action sequences.

It’s never a possibility to forget that it’s a Disney picture, filled as it is with the trappings of the Disney formula, but that’s hardly a burden in this case. Rather than feeling rote, these elements soar by being exceptionally well done. Co-directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard have made the best animated feature to come out of Disney since 2002’s Lilo and Stitch and the studio's best fairy tale since 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. The animation is a gorgeous, rounded CG style that is a close approximation to the traditional Disney 2D style. (It even uses the new 3D technology to lovely effect). The songs are delightful (if not immediately catchy), the supporting characters are likable, and the animal sidekicks are more than ready for their reaction shots. A goofy little chameleon is surprisingly subdued for a sidekick, with cute, nonverbal expressiveness. Even better is a mute law-enforcement horse that engages in a single-minded pursuit that gallops through the film bringing only hilarious antics.

And, of course, what would a Disney movie be without a romance? The relationship between Flynn and Rapunzel develops with admirable restraint, emerging slowly and cautiously out of the characters themselves. There’s never a sense that she needs a man to rescue her. (If any saving happens in the film, she saves him, or they save each other). Nor is there a sense that the romance is what’s driving her curiosity. She learns that she’s self-sufficient. Her romance develops along with her love of the outside world.

More than the average family film, and certainly more than anything Disney has done in a decade, Tangled packs plenty of emotion into a breezily entertaining romp. It’s pleasantly complicated and surprisingly touching. This is a film of direct, earnestly simple, skillfully playful, and self-assured storytelling that builds (in advance of its very satisfying climax) to one of the most beautiful sequences to hit the big screen all year. It starts with a tear running down a monarch’s face and ends with hundreds of floating lanterns surrounding a pair of potential lovers in a rowboat. It's surprisingly moving sequences like this, especially when they hit with such unexpected force, that make the movies worthwhile.