Gods-forsaken
It's not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019's Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-'80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, a foster kid given access to the power of a great wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou). For simply inscrutable reasons, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, the film's much-delayed and rescheduled sequel, jettisons both of these. The low-key hang-out family movie vibe has been ditched in favor of a bunch of loud sound effects and glossy, lifeless CGI, favoring irritatingly "big" stakes that involve large quantities of mythos-building, and resolve in a scene of people shooting beams of blue energy at each other. And to be fair, Shazam! already had these things; it's just that it was able to make room for lots of laid-back character beats where the stakes were neither more nor less than dudes being bros.
The Angel-Grazer-Levi buddy scenes are a big casualty of that, but even beyond the mere fact that Fury of the Gods just has way more generic comic book movie stuff to distract it from those scenes, screenwriters Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan have structured their story to have very nearly none of Billy's mortal teenager form across the film's pokey 130 minutes. So Angel is essentially cameoing in a film where he somehow still manages to pick up second billing. And then, the main trunk of the story goes further to lock Levi and Grazer in two non-intersecting plotlines, further reducing any opportunities for any of the bantering camaraderie that was, I hasten to reiterate, very obviously one of the best parts of the first movie, and I would have to imagine, a strength that would be fairly easy to re-create.
But that's Shazam! Fury of the Gods all over: a lot more visible effort than the first movie in exchange for a being worse in literally every single way. Most obviously, Levi himself has clearly lost the character: there was already a bit of a disconnect between how he and Angel played the two faces of Billy in Shazam! with Levi's take being rather clearly younger and more stupid. But it was the difference between, say, an average 16-year-old and a dopey 13-year-old. In Fury of the Gods, Levi has regressed the character down to, like, a witless ten-year-old, clueless about things that are just out-and-out mortifying. It's broad and shticky, divorced from anything resembling an honest approach to the character, when it was precisely having some honesty and warmth around the Billy/Freddy relationship that was at the heart of why Shazam! worked. I don't think one can entirely blame Levi for this: the script is giving absolutely nobody any material that they can work with, and it scuttles performers with a much deeper bag of tricks than Levi has. But he's in so much of it, and he's such an annoying presence, mugging like nobody's business to play a dumb kid in a muscle-man's body. He's literally not more than the third-best cast member at doing exactly this gimmick: Adam Brody plays the superhero version of Freddy as the kind of glib, preening sort that an adolescent boy might reasonably think a cool adult would act like, and Meagan Good plays the superhero version of the youngest child in the movie, Darla (Faithe Herman), as a playful innocent, prone to enthusiastic outbursts and gangly movement, too young to even have noted that her behavior might be perceived as odd by those around her (I think it would be reckless to say that Good is giving the film's "best" performance, given that she has maybe four total minutes of screentime, but across those four minutes, she was the only person I was consistently happy to be watching).
The story this time around is, honestly, perfectly functional boilerplate: Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), the Daughters of Atlas, are very annoyed that the power of the gods was given to a teenager in Philadelphia, so they come to Earth, and murder their way through a museum in a scene whose offhanded cruelty is pretty much the only thing in the film that ever makes a real emotional impact. Having thus retrieved the magic staff that was destroyed at the end of the first movie, they travel to Philly and track down Billy and his foster siblings, also imbued with the power of the gods, and attempt to isolate them, in order to strip their magic power. This happens to have happened right after Billy has annoyed the rest of them by going on and on about how much weaker they are separately than together. A great many long minutes after this starts, it gets resolved through a battle involving a dragon, and the Power of Family But Also Humility as Well as True Love - Freddy having fallen head over heels with the new girl at school, Anne (Rachel Zegler), who might have been a nice grace note in a better movie, but here obviously has to serve the mechanics of the plot in some way, and that way is the most obvious one possible.
That's all pretty run of the mill stuff, and it has clearly inspired nobody, from returning director David F. Sandberg on down. The film is as flat as could be, with a monotonous energy that turns dialogue scenes and action sequence alike into a churn of shots being clipped out at a deadening pace (in a film with no obviously good craftsmanship, the editing is decidedly the worst part), prohibiting the thing from ever picking up any serious amount of speed. The action setpieces are particularly hollow, like the film just wanted to get through them with the least amount of blocking. It's just as stiff and lifeless in front of the camera as behind it: Levi is annoying, but at least he's got some actual energy, which is true of very few people here. Mirren is relying entirely on her inherent gravity to sell her villain role, which is enough to make her a highlight of a cast where nobody else can even succeed at being lazy (Liu, for example, is mesmerizingly terrible, having taken aim at an old fashioned, mythic register of speaking and landed somewhere closer to "community theater My Fair Lady"). This is simply tired, a movie that has absolutely no aptitude for being lightweight fun, which was the one specific exact thing that the first Shazam! could claim as its particular strength in the superhero movie landscape. The worst part is, it's still decisively more watchable than any of Black Adam, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and so, horribly, this is the recent high-water mark for big-budget superhero movies.
Reviews in this series
Man of Steel (Snyder, 2013)
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016)
Suicide Squad (Ayer, 2016)
Wonder Woman (Jenkins, 2017)
Justice League (Snyder / Whedon, 2017)
Aquaman (Wan, 2018)
Shazam! (Sandberg, 2019)
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Yan, 2020)
Wonder Woman 1984 (Jenkins, 2020)
Zack Snyder's Justice League (Snyder, 2021)
The Suicide Squad (Gunn, 2021)
Black Adam (Collet-Serra, 2022)
Shazam! Fury of the Gods (Sandberg, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The Angel-Grazer-Levi buddy scenes are a big casualty of that, but even beyond the mere fact that Fury of the Gods just has way more generic comic book movie stuff to distract it from those scenes, screenwriters Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan have structured their story to have very nearly none of Billy's mortal teenager form across the film's pokey 130 minutes. So Angel is essentially cameoing in a film where he somehow still manages to pick up second billing. And then, the main trunk of the story goes further to lock Levi and Grazer in two non-intersecting plotlines, further reducing any opportunities for any of the bantering camaraderie that was, I hasten to reiterate, very obviously one of the best parts of the first movie, and I would have to imagine, a strength that would be fairly easy to re-create.
But that's Shazam! Fury of the Gods all over: a lot more visible effort than the first movie in exchange for a being worse in literally every single way. Most obviously, Levi himself has clearly lost the character: there was already a bit of a disconnect between how he and Angel played the two faces of Billy in Shazam! with Levi's take being rather clearly younger and more stupid. But it was the difference between, say, an average 16-year-old and a dopey 13-year-old. In Fury of the Gods, Levi has regressed the character down to, like, a witless ten-year-old, clueless about things that are just out-and-out mortifying. It's broad and shticky, divorced from anything resembling an honest approach to the character, when it was precisely having some honesty and warmth around the Billy/Freddy relationship that was at the heart of why Shazam! worked. I don't think one can entirely blame Levi for this: the script is giving absolutely nobody any material that they can work with, and it scuttles performers with a much deeper bag of tricks than Levi has. But he's in so much of it, and he's such an annoying presence, mugging like nobody's business to play a dumb kid in a muscle-man's body. He's literally not more than the third-best cast member at doing exactly this gimmick: Adam Brody plays the superhero version of Freddy as the kind of glib, preening sort that an adolescent boy might reasonably think a cool adult would act like, and Meagan Good plays the superhero version of the youngest child in the movie, Darla (Faithe Herman), as a playful innocent, prone to enthusiastic outbursts and gangly movement, too young to even have noted that her behavior might be perceived as odd by those around her (I think it would be reckless to say that Good is giving the film's "best" performance, given that she has maybe four total minutes of screentime, but across those four minutes, she was the only person I was consistently happy to be watching).
The story this time around is, honestly, perfectly functional boilerplate: Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), the Daughters of Atlas, are very annoyed that the power of the gods was given to a teenager in Philadelphia, so they come to Earth, and murder their way through a museum in a scene whose offhanded cruelty is pretty much the only thing in the film that ever makes a real emotional impact. Having thus retrieved the magic staff that was destroyed at the end of the first movie, they travel to Philly and track down Billy and his foster siblings, also imbued with the power of the gods, and attempt to isolate them, in order to strip their magic power. This happens to have happened right after Billy has annoyed the rest of them by going on and on about how much weaker they are separately than together. A great many long minutes after this starts, it gets resolved through a battle involving a dragon, and the Power of Family But Also Humility as Well as True Love - Freddy having fallen head over heels with the new girl at school, Anne (Rachel Zegler), who might have been a nice grace note in a better movie, but here obviously has to serve the mechanics of the plot in some way, and that way is the most obvious one possible.
That's all pretty run of the mill stuff, and it has clearly inspired nobody, from returning director David F. Sandberg on down. The film is as flat as could be, with a monotonous energy that turns dialogue scenes and action sequence alike into a churn of shots being clipped out at a deadening pace (in a film with no obviously good craftsmanship, the editing is decidedly the worst part), prohibiting the thing from ever picking up any serious amount of speed. The action setpieces are particularly hollow, like the film just wanted to get through them with the least amount of blocking. It's just as stiff and lifeless in front of the camera as behind it: Levi is annoying, but at least he's got some actual energy, which is true of very few people here. Mirren is relying entirely on her inherent gravity to sell her villain role, which is enough to make her a highlight of a cast where nobody else can even succeed at being lazy (Liu, for example, is mesmerizingly terrible, having taken aim at an old fashioned, mythic register of speaking and landed somewhere closer to "community theater My Fair Lady"). This is simply tired, a movie that has absolutely no aptitude for being lightweight fun, which was the one specific exact thing that the first Shazam! could claim as its particular strength in the superhero movie landscape. The worst part is, it's still decisively more watchable than any of Black Adam, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and so, horribly, this is the recent high-water mark for big-budget superhero movies.
Reviews in this series
Man of Steel (Snyder, 2013)
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016)
Suicide Squad (Ayer, 2016)
Wonder Woman (Jenkins, 2017)
Justice League (Snyder / Whedon, 2017)
Aquaman (Wan, 2018)
Shazam! (Sandberg, 2019)
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Yan, 2020)
Wonder Woman 1984 (Jenkins, 2020)
Zack Snyder's Justice League (Snyder, 2021)
The Suicide Squad (Gunn, 2021)
Black Adam (Collet-Serra, 2022)
Shazam! Fury of the Gods (Sandberg, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
