Entry #10: Kazaam

I AM KAZAAM!

are not. 

Kazaam too.

In my continuing struggle to compare newer bad movies with big budgets to old school drive-in types, I will now be posting the film's release date and budget adjusted to today's dollars.  I guess you can be the judge how to weigh release date and budget into the equation. 

Release Date: July 17, 1996
Budget:  $28,900,000.  I wish they would've spent that money on something else.

In short summary, Kazaam is about a genie who lived in a jukebox until Max, our young protagonist struggling to make it by in the hood, accidentally frees him while fleeing from local bullies.  Max pisses away his three wishes on silly things like candy, ice cream, and trying to get his mom and dad back together again.  In the end, Kazaam (played by Shaq) gets a heart and becomes a super genie or something, Max reunites with his dad, and accepts his mom's new lover.  Big surprise.

Kazaam has 2 things going for it: 1) it is reasonably well filmed; and 2) it has good bass.  That's about it.  Kazaam does, however, have a lot of bad things going for it.

In reviewing my notes I noticed that I wrote the phrase 'terrible acting', in some shape or form, about 10 times.  That should give you a good indication of just how bad the acting is, and Shaq is the worst.  He ruined the NBA by planting his fat ass in the lane and he tried to ruin Hollywood by planting his fat ass in this movie.  When asked later why he did Kazaam, his response was "they offered me $7,000,000".  The only reasonable acting performance is turned in by Ally Walker who plays Max's mom.  Granted, the dialogue here doesn't give the cast much to work with but ultimately the rest of the crew, according to my fastidious notes, are downright 'terrible actors'. 

Shaq's intermittent rapping is also quite unnerving and it happens more often than you'd like.  It's really less like rapping and more like yelling with rhymed words.  Some jewels of wisdom dropped by Kazaam include:

"If you wanna be number one, I'm sorry boy, that's been done! But if you got the itches for a sack of riches don't matter how avaricious, I'm the man that can grant your wishes!"

and the immortal:

"Let's green eggs and ham it!"

And of course, there had to be an awkwardly placed rap off between Da Brat and Shaq, which serves absolutely no purpose. 

Some other awesome things I loved about Kazaam include:

• There is a scene where Max doesn't believe Kazaam is  a genie (I think) but Kazaam tries to convince him to make a wish to prove himself.  Somehow the way they decide this is a bike race in which Shaq's bike turns into some sort of super bike/spaceship thingy.  Don't get me wrong, I love a good bike race; I'm just not sure how or why this one came about. 
• After losing the bike race, Max does indeed make a wish and wishes for mountains of junk food.  Kazaam obliges, but mountains of junk food ends up being a light dusting of skittles and elementary school grade pizza.  Pretty pathetic genie if you ask me....
• The bad guy, Malik, is in the movie for what seemed like about 5 minutes.  He strangely has unexplained powers over Shaq for a couple of those minutes and then Shaq magically mans up and dunks Malik into a dumpster.  End of threat.
• Despite a horrific fire in Max's dad's music pirating building, everyone walks out without a scratch.  Max's dad may have even looked better after the fire.  Note to self: fires aren't as bad as everyone keeps telling me. 

I give Kazaam a rating of -7.  It's pretty bad, but the plot is actually okay and could have been reasonably uplifting/cute.  Where Kazaam really suffers is its general stupidity, bad acting, and rhyme yelling.