Shazam was just mean

There has been a shit-tonne of talk about the box-office failures of recent superhero movies, but there are loads of reasons why nobody gave a fuck about the new Aquaman movie or that Madame Web thing. Movies, like life, are quite complex.

There's obvious aspects like the actors acting like absolute arses in real life, or the rush job on CGI worlds giving everybody a fucking headache. I still maintain that the primary reason for the recent failures is that people want to see something new at the movies, not the same old shit over and over, and if you can properly deliver on that, your work is mostly done. 

But you can also attribute it to the actual shittiness of the product, because movies that leave a bad taste in the mouth never, ever generate word of mouth, and when I finally saw the latest Shazam film, it didn't take me long to see why nobody was talking about it.

It wasn't just the extremely irritating thing where grown-ass actors playing teenagers act like freaking toddlers, or even the distasteful sight of Helen freakin' Mirren getting punched by a young white man, 

it was the way it was also just straight up mean - picking up DC's irritating DC habit of killing off vast amounts of innocent people to show that things are really, really dire.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods looks like a kid-friendly movie all the way, but a room full of museum goers are turned to fragile stone at the start, and only acknowledged once again - dozens of people, children, young lovers, they all need to be shuffled into the maw of death to raise the stakes.

Later on in the film, it's almost like it's making fun of its own meanness, with one innocent bystander narrowly avoiding a spiky death by centimetres, only to be immediately stabbed in the back by a giant scorpion monster and casually tossed through a shopfront. Tough luck, lady, but how else will these teenagers learn about responsibility and stuff if they don't have your blood on their hands?

There is always pathos in tragedy, but leaving behind a huge body count just feels mean, and if we all just want to see something new in big, goofy superhero films, there's nothing new in mean.