Shazam! Fury of the Gods

It’s a case of massively diminishing returns for Zachary Levi’s snap-talking teen superhero in this sequel which struggles to locate a raison d’être.

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.

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Published 15 Mar 2023

Tags: David F Sandberg DC Zachary Levi