Shaz­am! Fury of the Gods

There’s a lot of ​“Googling” and ​“Thesaurus.com-ing” in Shaz­am! Fury of the Gods, so I decid­ed to rhetor­i­cal­ly Google the phrase, ​“What’s the name for some­thing that, with­in the realms of nat­ur­al law, doesn’t need to exist?” while also search­ing for some syn­onyms for the word ​“super­flu­ous”. By some strange glitch, the answer that popped up was the name of this very film whose char­ac­ters have been passed through a dis­mal­ly rote sequel gen­er­a­tor for a lit­tle bit more of the same.

The first time around, back in 2019, David F Sand­berg was able to kit out the stan­dard issue super­hero ori­gin saga in brand new boots and panties by fus­ing it to the plot of beloved late-eight­ies body-swap fan­ta­sia, Big. And it more or less worked, offer­ing a small but mean­ing­ful twist on a tale (great pow­er, great respon­si­bil­i­ty, yada yada…) that, in the last two decades, has been served up to the pub­lic on a rough­ly quar­ter­ly basis.

The idea of an angu­lar, emo­tion­al­ly dis­lo­cat­ed orphan teen (Ash­er Angel) exist­ing inside the body of a com­i­cal­ly-swole wise­crack­ing demigod (Zachary Levi) with world-sav­ing duties piled up on the plate packed the film with a mea­sure of dra­mat­ic heft – not to men­tion the neat, late-game twist where all his eccen­tric fos­ter broth­ers and sis­ters are also imbued with awe­some powers.

This new film works on the assump­tion that every­one knows what’s going on (there’s no recap­ping for the unini­ti­at­ed), and we’re now just flatlin­ing from the point we reached at the end of the first film. Angel, as the young Bil­ly Batson/​Shazam, bare­ly fea­tures in this new one, as Levi is giv­en full reign to pow­er through his late night chat show schtick which, at best, sel­dom lands and, at worst, feels like des­per­ate attempt to tap into bleed­ing edge social media vernacular.

The goofy humour of the first film falls through the always-con­spic­u­ous CG cracks and, in its place, we have a film­mak­er try­ing to con­dense a bloat­ed and banal three hour script into a two hour run­time. There’s a lot of time mask­ing the fact that there’s noth­ing left to say for this char­ac­ter, but what’s most dis­ap­point­ing is the con­stant repack­ag­ing of ideas and jokes from the first film. There’s an army of myth­i­cal mon­sters who appear that are all-but-iden­ti­cal to the antag­o­nists of Shaz­am! one, and it’s per­plex­ing to have to won­der why we’re watch­ing the same thing over again rather than enjoy­ing a block­buster movie that trades in basic originality.

The title sug­gests the Gods are furi­ous, but in actu­al fact they’re just a bit miffed (irri­tat­ed at most) that humankind unknow­ing­ly laid waste to their oth­er­world­ly par­adise. And now they’re out for some light revenge. So we have the three daugh­ters of Atlas who have all dived into the Wag­ner­ian pan­to dress­ing up for some semi-series bad­die detail, and all of whom have nag­ging­ly inde­ter­mi­nate pow­ers. There’s Lucy Liu as Kalyp­so, Helen Mir­ren as Hes­pera and Rachel Zegler as Anthea, and they all do what they need to do to get the film over the line. Mirren’s ethe­re­al white hair is the film’s one true glory.

The wizard’s staff that was used in the first film to cre­ate Shaz­am has now been subbed in as form an attack on the city of Philadel­phia and, one by one, the fam­i­ly are stripped of their pow­ers leav­ing only our epony­mous hero to save the day. It does take things from A to B to C just-about flu­ent­ly enough, yet it’s all very tired, trudg­ing large­ly over the same dust­worn the­mat­ic ground as the pre­vi­ous film. Indeed, Shaz­am even draws atten­tion to the film’s vapid­ly inspi­ra­tional core by jok­ing­ly com­par­ing it to the Fast and the Furi­ous franchise.

Else­where there’s a pae­di­a­tri­cian char­ac­ter who appears right at the top of the film named Dario Bava MD for no dis­cernible rea­son. I was watch­ing in the hope that there may be some kind of sub­tle ref­er­ence to the two mae­stros of Ital­ian ​‘gial­lo’ film­mak­ing, but there were none I was to notice.

And where the first film paid homage to 1988’s Big, this one seems to namecheck the cor­po­rate­ly-sanc­tioned atroc­i­ty from the same year, Mac and Me, with much uncom­fort­able stealth mar­ket­ing for tongue-dying sweet treats. And much like the can­dy whose cor­po­rate slo­gan fea­tures as one of the most promi­nent aspects of the script, Shaz­am! Fury of the Gods is a film with close-to-zero nutri­tion­al value.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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