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Absolutely brilliant

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The good thing about watching movies years after they come out is that you can form a nuanced opinion without the influence of the cultural reception at the time. Watching Kazaam taught me that there's nothing nuanced about how terrible this movie is. You heard it was bad. I heard it was bad. We can now agree that there's nothing clouding our judgment.This movie reeks of the decade it was made in. Physically-incapable-of-acting basketball star Shaq is the title character, a genie that lives in a boombox. The protagonist of the movie is Max, a bratty kid that finds Kazaam in an abandoned building. We're supposed to sympathize with Max because he's bullied, but he's such a little jerk that it's actually cathartic to watch him get bullied. Kazaam and Max make an unlikely pair, not just because a 7 foot tall black man follows a little white boy around New York like a lost puppy, but also because Kazaam wants to go through the three wishes to gain his freedom (and hopefully get far, far away from this kid), and Max, in a completely realistic and tightly written portrayal of the selfish child that he is, decides that he doesn't want to use any of the magic wishes his genie is begging him to make. The "plot" of the film revolves around Max learning that his mother lied to him all these years and that his father actually lives in the city, so he goes off to see his father for the first time in however many years (Kazaam is along for the ride). He's crushed to find out that his dad is a total sleazebag (like father like son) music executive and eventually it's up to Kazaam to use his miraculous powers not to end poverty, war or world hunger but to mend this broken white family. There's another sleazebag that figures out Kazaam is a genie and plots to steal him out from under Max.If you found Shaq's non-acting to be distressing, prepare yourself for the trauma that is his rapping. This movie fails in just about every conceivable way. A story about a kid and his genie should be pretty straightforward but somehow, most of the characters are unlikable, the plot is dull and predictable, and I'll sound like a broken record if I keep talking about the acting. Space Jam, this is not.

"Let's green egg and ham it." I was only seven years old when Kazaam was released into theaters, starring Shaquille O'Neal as the eponymous enchanter. And to this day I am truly grateful that my parents never took me to see this magical mishap of a motion picture two decades later. Back in the 90s when Shaq was at the height (no pun intended) of his professional career with the NBA, Los Angels Lakers and doing several Reebok or Pepsi commercials, his film appearances, especially as a main character, proved to be disastrous. The tag line on the VHS and DVD cover or what have you reads: "He's a rappin' genie-with-an-attitude...and he's ready for slam-dunk fun!" I as the viewer greatly disapproved. Even the Los Angeles Daily News didn't know what to say, so they just slapped "FUN!" on the cover in big capitalized yellow letters. Nonetheless, I would taken away the 'N'. With a budget of $20 million, only earning back $18.9 million in return, it also obtained a six percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on thirty-three reviews, and a twenty-four out of one hundred on Metacritic. So why did this family fantasy flop so hard? Let's take a look.The film promptly opens on a swinging wrecking ball knocking down a dilapidated building in New York City; a perfect metaphor. A final swing knocks Kazaam's lamp in slow motion onto a boombox that just happens to be there as we hear him screaming. And how fitting to see director Paul M. Glaser's (David Starsky from the Starsky & Hutch TV show) name appearing over the sound of breaking pottery. That sound effect alone sums up the rest of the movie indefinitely. We then meet Max Connor (Francis Capra), a twelve-year-old kid on the run from a local gang of bullies, who chase him into the said building being demolished. Max accidentally kicks the boombox and unknowingly awakens the 5,000 year-old genie just as the bullies find him. Kazaam scares them away with his so-called rapping. Max later goes home to Alice (Ally Walker). She is a single Mom of whom she and her son don't exactly see eye to eye, especially since she's seeing a fireman named Travis (John Costelloe, of whom was an actual FDNY firefighter in real life and played Jim "Johnny Cakes" Witowski on The Sopranos). Kazaam later explains to the troubled youth, of whom at first wants nothing to do with him, that he can grant him three wishes. From telling Max that he doesn't "believe in fairy tales" to even taking a shower in front of Max in his own bedroom singing an almost unrecognizable rendition of Stayin' Alive...its just a mess.Eventually the tough Max warms up to Kazaam and starts to believe what he says when he causes mountains of junk food to rain down from the heavens. He also realizes that he owns the towering turban-wearing thaumaturge until he makes his last two wishes. Of course what Max really wants is to get to know his estranged father (James Acheson), of whom left him when he was two. He sets out to find him, only to discover that he is a musical talent producer of which the cause of his success is specializing in unauthorized music. Kazaam forgets about Max once the boy's father takes a liking to him as a new possible rap talent as he tries his hand at a music career at his nightclub. But the sleazy villainous club owner Malik (Marshell Manesh), wants Kazaam for his own, and it is only the final wish, from the heart, that Max wishes that his Dad would be given a second chance at life as Kazaam personally deals with the Malik and his cronies. Hereafter, Max then accepts Travis as a new father figure. Kazaam is really one of those good/bad movies that emerged in the 90s. It was good because it was and still is a fairly harmless family film, but bad because it has over time gained attention since its release for its absurd concept and Shaquille O'Neal's performance, making it a critical and financial failure. It also caused Paul M. Glaser to never direct another film since due to negative reviews on his work. Roger Ebert gave the film 1.5 stars, writing: "Shaq has already proved he can act (in Blue Chips, the 1994 movie about college basketball). Here he shows he can be likable in a children's movie. What he does not show is good judgment in his choice of material. [...] the filmmakers didn't care to extend themselves beyond the obvious commercial possibilities of their first dim idea." In a 2012 interview with GQ magazine, O'Neal said, "I was a medium-level juvenile delinquent from Newark who always dreamed about doing a movie. Someone said, 'Hey, here's $7 million, come in and do this genie movie.' What am I going to say, no? So I did it." Though more suited in appearing as a film cameo, Shaq's last leading role would be in the following year as John Henry Irons/Steel in the critically-acclaimed box office bomb 'Steel', nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Actor.If Kazaam is wishful thinking in the power to begin anew, than it should have stayed bottled up and lost for one-thousand and one nights deep beneath the sands of the Arabian desert. The film is innocuous but its demise is that it is solely based on and crafted from a mix of genre clichés. Kazaam lacks imaginative stamina and, compared with Shaq's larger-than-life charisma, the film does not know what it wants to be either due to stifled, routine filmmaking and terrible rapping. Nowadays the movie is just a guilty pleasure for millennials to riff or poke fun at. My wish for you is that you never buy or rent Kazaam and see this jolly black giant on your television screen anytime soon.

Kazaam has been sealed up for thousands of years, until one day he is accidentally freed by Max, who is on the run from a local gang. Kazaam explains that he belongs to Max until he grants him three wishes, but what Max really wants is to get to know his estranged father. When the genie, who considers trying his hand at a music career, forgets about his young master, Max is attacked by villainous club owner Malik..........Shaq had a couple of years in the nineties where the marketing bods saw something I the brand that was Shaq. First there was his silly game, Shaq-Fu, which was a Mortal Kombat rip off, then there was his illustrious music career, which in turn gave him the chance not only to star, but to executive produce his two 'big' movies.Steel came after this, and is decidedly better than this, but there is something really weird about Kazaam, it's bad, sometimes hilariously bad, but the studio must have had a little faith in the film, being released in the summer, just a couple of weeks after Independence Day.So Max finds Shaq, hates his mother and step dad to be, finds his real dad, who hates him, and in turn, influences Shaq to hate everybody via the power of rap, and his magical boom box.The first wish Max should have asked for was to repair that distracting crooked tooth to be corrected, and to get some manners, because Max has to be one of the most unbearable child characters I've seen in a while. He's abhorrent to his mother, who appears to be in a totally different film, and he looks up to a man who wouldn't give him the time of day.Shaq cannot act for a toffee, here it seems that he was just trying to showcase his rappin' talents and hope that the two combined would catapult him to the big time.It didn't,And the fact that Max falls the equivalent of the Chrysler building through the film begs the question, is all this happening in his subconscious? Die he really see a man take a shower in his own room?Clearly not as horrid as most say, but it's still pretty terrible.

This movie deserves no rating, and it's not for the reasons you'd think. It is a complete failure, but mostly because it got past common sense, Hollywood budgets, and directing standards.All because I believe Shaq threw enormous piles of money at it, and no one wanted to tell him this was the worst possible movie idea.Also take note that Shaq raises his eyebrows every other word he speaks.Some moments are only mildly painful, while others are clench your teeth, eye-squinting travesties. Most notably, the rap battle between the boy and Shaq, where they repeat "We ain't men, we genie."* Scowling at a piece of toast. * A boom box that shoots a shower of sparks * A grown man showering in front of a child * A rapping genie, that despite boasting his lyrical skills, always starts every rhyme with "I am Kazaam" * More than an hour of your life wastedThese are what you have to look forward to in watching this.I'm troubled that anyone thought this would make money, or legitimize Shaq's rapping career in the minds of children.If you have a choice between sitting in gridlock traffic for 9 hours, 10 straight hours of oral surgery or watching Kazaam, Kazaam wins by a slight margin. There's no more positive endorsement I can give.