Pun Salad

Well, this got decent reviews. (Unlike, say, Justice League.) And it's not bad, and actually good in spots.

An opening scene develops in an unexpected way: a car accident leads a kid to be transported to a mystical cavern where he meets a mystical wizard, who spouts mystical mumbo-jumbo at him, … and then, disappointed, transports him back to the scene of the car wreck, where his father is in bad shape, and blaming him for the crash.

Hey, that's not the way I remember the comic books going…

Ah, but then we leap a number of years into the future, where young Billy Batson gets separated from his mom at a carnival, turns into a very rebellious foster child, takes a mystical subway ride to that wizard's lair we saw before, where the wizard (apparently very desperate to transfer his mystical powers) bestows the magic word…

OK, that's pretty complicated. But the bottom line is that young Billy can transform himself into a (nameless, due to copyright hassles) superhero. But his adult heavily-muscled superhero bod is still operated by his adolescent boy brain. The movie turns into a laff riot, as he discovers exactly which superpowers he has.

But that kid from the opening scene has matured into everyone's favorite Bad Guy, Mark Strong. And he wangles his way back to the wizard's lair himself, and gains powers too. Conflict ahead!

The movie is wonderfully funny in spots. But it has a split personality, because there's considerable darkness too. For one thing: remember that I said Billy got lost at the carnival? Well, the details revealed later about that are a little disturbing…