A Year of Garbage Movies #28: “Kazaam” (1996)
Every rose has its thorn, just like every “Space Jam” has its “Kazaam”.
1996 was the year for basketball stars to take to the Big Screen. It would prove to be both the high and the low of basketball-related cinema. On the one hand we had the most perfect movie ever made, “Space Jam” starring Michael Jordan and the entire cast of Looney Tune, a documentary about how Jordan sucked at baseball so he made a glorious return to basketball with Bill Murray. And there was Shaquile O’Neal’s “Kazaam”, which is unfortunately the movie I have to write about today.
“Kazaam” tells the story of how a pain-in-the-ass kid finds a magic boombox that contains Kazaam, the genie portrayed by O’Neal. Once summoned, he must grant 3 wishes. The only limitation is that these wishes have to be for material things. Right off the bat he fails to summon a jaguar and somehow vanishes, a strange plot point that is never really mentioned again or explained aside from “being rusty”. Also, Kazaam rhymes everything he says for the first couple pages of his dialogue, but then abruptly stops. I guess O’Neal only had a finite number of sick rhymes he could lay down and wanted to save the rest for his performance with Salt n Pepa later in the movie.
Basically this story is your typical “annoying douchebag kid misses his father he never knew and hates mom’s new boyfriend for no real reason so he has to learn a lesson” but without any real character growth or anything like that. Max, the main character, is just as annoying and entitled at the end as he is at the beginning, with the only real change being his realization that his dad is actually a piece of shit. O’Neal has been fairly upfront since the movie’s release that this was sort of his childhood dream come true: be a movie star, be a rapper (even if he is just playing a rap star in the same movie), be a genie (I guess?), and that he doesn’t really care that it’s a bad movie.
Props to my main man Travis, however, for being a good dude. Not only is he a a firefighter, a fact crammed down your throat to highlight how good of a dude he is, but he doesn’t straight up murder Max in the first act. That alone should qualify him for sainthood. Dude then tries to get a tutor for his dumbass stepson-to-be, even when Max is like “School is for tools Imma ride my bike around an abandoned warehouse all day”. But on the other hand, he manages with his body language to convey the “I’m slamming your mom” message that underlies every interaction he has with Max in this movie, which does sort of set off a chain of events that results in Max falling down an elevator shaft, which I thought would have been a fantastic happy ending to this movie.
Unfortunately that didn’t sit well with test audiences and there’s this whole “Shaq becomes a djinn who can do literally anything” angle tacked on to magic everything right with the world.
“Kazaam” is a cautionary tale of what “Space Jam” might have been had it not been handled by a team of the world’s greatest artists. For that we should be thankful.
Pros:
- Shaq seems to have found his calling as a sheriff, so the streets are safer because of this stupid movie probably
Cons:
- We’ll probably never see “Shazaam” starring Sinbad.
