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Genie in a Boom Box

(1.8MB AVI) | (1.8MB MOV)

Kazaam, starring Shaquille O'Neal; directed by Paul M. Glaser

Kazaam is a live-action Disney movie about a city boy and a hip-hop genie--it's predictable as an animal cracker but flavored with the hot-sauce charisma of basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal in the title role. The boy, Max (Francis Capra), has a standard menu of problems and challenges: his mother, who has raised him on her own, wants to marry a man Max despises on angry preteen principle; every day, local bullies beat him up for his lunch money.

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It's while he's fleeing a beating that Max dashes into a deserted building and accidentally liberates the genie Kazaam from a ghetto blaster where he has lately been trapped. Although Kazaam is over five thousand years old, and usually resides in lamps, he's also "done time" in bottles and ship's compasses. This boom box is merely his most recent lodging--but it might explain why he comes out rappin'. The movie is dull and by-the-book until O'Neal roars into it. The lyrics he spouts are clever, and give us the ground rules of the fantasy: "I don't deal in no abstract wishes/ What I got to offer you is property and riches/ Love, death, and destiny--that's all ethereal/ Want a wish from me, you got to ask for what's material."

Max (completely ignoring the $6 billion or the power to fly like Superman that this critic would have wished for at age ten) wants his real father back. (Snore.) Kazaam can't help him: his wish falls into the category of love and destiny. But since the genie can't go free until Max has made his three wishes, they're stuck together. They fight, they bond, they get into trouble. Max hasn't seen his real father (John Acheson) in years, but the pair traces him to the popular, criminal nightclub he runs with Malik (Marshall Manesh), an Arabic boogeyman who knows all about genies and wants Kazaam for himself.

52

Despite Manesh's zesty, uninhibited incarnation of villainy, Malik's wickedness constitutes a depressing ethnic stereotype (he's the only Middle Easterner in the movie). These nightclub sequences are cheesily plotted, anyway. There are a myriad of crises and ups and downs that make no sense, except that crises are required so Max and Kazaam may forge the deeper friendship they need (etc.), to learn their inevitable Disney lesson, which is that True Power Comes From Within (etc.).

The movie both dies and lives by being so custom-designed as a vehicle for O'Neal: the bad news is nothing else is as interesting or as much fun as he is; the good news is that when he's on-screen, the whole picture jumps and pumps. He's a fireball in the movie's ample musical numbers. He's also a warm, confident screen presence in the intimate scenes--he makes you feel, without any stretch of the imagination, that Kazaam genuinely loves this little boy. And that means, in those inevitable E.T. moments when we think that either Kazaam or Max has come to harm, children in the audience at the preview were genuinely moved, and buzzing about it after. -- F.X. Feeney

(A Touchstone Pictures release; rated PG for menacing school bullies and nightclub criminals.)


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