I saw it in theaters, and had to leave at the part in which Billy, having turned into Shazam, meets up with Freddie and accidentally drops his prized bullet into the sewer grate. The reason was that the theater somehow turned the volume up uncomfortably loud (although it was fine when I saw Avengers Endgame a few weeks later), although I wasn\'t exactly enjoying it up until then. I eventually got it on Netflix, and while the second half was somewhat better than the first, I mostly agree with your criticisms.
I agree that Sivana often came off as more sympathetic than Billy. This is especially true since the latter refused to connect with his foster families in favor of a mother who willingly abandoned him; he should\'ve listened to the social worker when she said that his mother would have come for him if she wanted to find him.
That being said, it\'s implied that thanks to Sivana\'s invasion of the Rock of Ages, he\'d run out of time. With no other options, he chose Billy, the first person who came through the door since Sivana\'s attack, rather than subject him to the test everyone else had failed. As for why Billy eventually became a hero and defeated Sivana, I guess it\'s mainly due to be dumb luck.
To be fair, he only succeeds in defeating Sivana by growing as a person, but still. Again, I really liked that last act; it was everything the charmless first two weren\'t.
Also, Mary and the rest of the family kind of got the shaft, as the YMMV page suggests, and that their scenes were \"cut for time\" while the interminable social media montages were not shines uncomplimentary light on the priorities of someone involved in the editing process.
I do think Sivana lost outright sympathy when he started murdering people who had nothing to do with his trauma, in an earlier scene, but, again, like Aquaman where you still kind of get some humanity in there with the evil.
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...God, is this how my dad felt watching The Dark Knight Trilogy?
So let's get this out of the way right now: I hated the first two acts of this movie. It absolutely boggles my mind that any of the people who whine ceaselessly about how bad Man of Steel supposedly was could somehow enjoy this movie, which commits a worse hatchet job on Captain Marvel than that film ever did on Superman, and that they could ever have found the main character "relatable" says volumes about not only their sense of priorities and taste, but, given they "related" to him, themselves as human beings.
So, from a purely technical perspective, it's not all bad. The effects are pretty standard superhero movie fare, with plenty of bright cheery colors and particles sparking about. And the very last act of the movie actually does manage to pull everything together pretty well, into a final climax I quite unironically enjoyed.
And, I will give credit where it's due: Captain Marvel has got a lot of superpowers, and the script, which leaves him figuring them out a bit at a time, manages to introduce them to the audience in dribs and drabs. That's a genuinely clever idea, and it even manages to play to some (sometimes) effective humor. Also, Sivana's one of the better DC movie villains outside of Aquaman. His motivations and characterization work fairly well, so much that before he was vaporizing people in his first adult scene, I kind of sympathized much more with him than the hero.
Unfortunately, it's not all lightning bolts and laughs. There's a great deal of tonal dissonance between the creepy horror movie scenes of Sivana unleashing his gargoyle henchmen to devour men and women alive and the wacky montages where Billy does "relatable" social media videos and the occasional genuinely funny antic. Childish antics for the kids are juxtaposed with unnecessarily adult and sexual gags for the grown ups.
Which, as I carefully laid out in the opening, and then danced around until this point so you'd know that I do have opinions outside of my fanboy rage, brings us to this film's major failing: Billy Batson, the kid who could look Superman in the eye and be secure in the moral high ground, is just an awful little turd of a human being from his very first scene in the film, where he tricks some well-meaning cops, taunts and mocks them as he traps them in a building, and then steals one of their lunches once he's gotten some plot-relevant information from a cop car, just to be a dick. And while I don't pretend that wanting to reunite with his missing mom isn't a human urge, he spends the whole first two acts of the film establishing that he hasn't been failed by the system; that his previous and present foster parents and foster brothers and sisters are kind and loving people, as he smugly bats away their attempts at connection. He even steals from a handicapped kid, just to be a dick.
"Oh," people say, "but it gives him a character arc!" Alright. So did Batman in Batman v Superman, and you hated that. And at least Batman was physically and mentally worn down as he cracked and went bad in that film. Billy only gets worse when he gets his powers, immediately abusing them to steal things, to become, as his foster brother puts it, "a bully and a dick."
And that's just what makes him too unlikable to root for for most of the film. In context, namely, as an adaptation of a classic comic book character, it's a travesty. How could this kid have possibly been the right choice to bear Shazam's power over literally any of his other family members? Also, maybe don't establish he's got the Wisdom of Solomon in this incarnation in the very first introduction to all his powers and then spend the rest of the movie having him act like kind of a stupid and rudderless buffoon?
I won't pretend he's like that all movie, and, again, the last act really pulls it all together. I especially liked the little mythology gag of him handing that tiger to the little girl he's calming down, or that one spoiler I'm tiptoeing around which only serves to prove my point about the first two thirds of the film. But this is not only a flawed and imperfect film because of its unlikable protagonist and schizophrenic tone, it's, yes I'll say it, a slap in the face to one of the oldest superhero institutions of all time, and that's true no matter how lovely and charming that last act might be.