Shazam! Fury of the Gods: Film Review
I really enjoyed the original Shazam! back in 2019 as its charming, irreverent tone felt like a breath of fresh air among the rest of the serious DCU movies. I’m sad to report that Shazam! Fury of the Gods is nowhere as fun as the first one.
As a quick recap – the movie tells the story of teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who can turn into an adult superhero (played by Zachary Levi) by saying the word ‘Shazam’. At the end of the last movie, Billy used the wizard’s magical staff to share his powers with his foster siblings before breaking it in half. He now has a team of crime-fighting heroes by his side – Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer/Adam Brody), Darla (Faithe Herman/Meagan Good), Eugene (Ian Chen/Ross Butler), Pedro (Jovan Armand/D.J. Cotrona) and Mary (Grace Fulton as both versions) – although their attempts to save the people of Philadelphia are rather haphazard.
It turns out the broken magical staff is very important and the Daughters of Atlas – Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu) and Anthea (Rachel Zegler) – want it to resurrect their world and destroy Earth. Shazam and his siblings have to fight the trio to save the world!
The first Shazam! was such a welcome change of pace from the other DCU movies because it was light-hearted and felt smaller in scale. It was different and all the better for it. This time around, it is just trying to be like every other superhero movie and it loses its unique identity as a result. There are still moments of humour, but they aren’t funny or frequent enough to elevate the convoluted and generic superhero plot.
Upping the scale has had a detrimental effect in other areas too. There are so many characters that there simply isn’t enough for each person to do, with the majority of Shazam’s siblings contributing very little. There should have been more Darla – Herman is adorable and Good brings that child-like wonder to the superhero version. Thankfully, teenage Freddy, my favourite character from the original, gets a lot of screen time as the loveable nerd, who has an interesting arc with both Zegler and Djimon Hounsou as the wizard.
Given the movie is called Shazam!, you would expect the title character to be the favourite but he was the most grating. His motor-mouth quips were endearing last time but his schtick rarely works here. It’s not purely Levi’s fault; he is clearly trying to inject as much quirky personality into his character as possible, but the script isn’t witty enough. I expected the Daughters of Atlas to bring more to the table with such amazing actresses in their shoes but it’s all very standard, stereotypical villain nonsense. Mirren and Liu are wasted!
Shazam! Fury of the Gods loses its charming identity by going bigger. It falls into the traps of several other superhero movies – messy and unoriginal plot, cliched script and poor CGI on and off throughout. I’ll be amazed if James Gunn and Peter Safran continue with Shazam! now they’ve taken over DC.
In cinemas from Friday 17th March