Josh Reviews Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Two years after the events of the first Shazam! film, we see that Billy Batson and his foster-siblings are continuing to try to use their superpowers to help people.  But they don’t work that well as a team, and the individual kids are drifting apart as they get older and live their lives.  Freddy in particular is enjoying going off on his own adventures as the self-named “Captain Every-Power”, and he’s even caught the eye of a beautiful new girl at school, Anne.  So the kids aren’t exactly at their best when the Daughters of Atlas take the Wizard Shazam’s broken staff and use it to try to recreate their lost magical realm on Earth.  It seems the superpowers that the Wizard gifted to Billy Batson and his family were drawn from the powers of the Gods like the Daughters of Atlas… and they want those powers back…

Shazam! Fury of the Gods has underperformed in theaters and it’s getting lousy reviews, which is a shame, because I enjoyed this film and I had fun watching it!  It’s an entertaining film with fun characters and some terrific action set-pieces.  Great cinema this is not, but I had a good time eating popcorn and going on this adventure.

For a moderately budgeted superhero film, I think Fury of the Gods looks great, and it’s far more epic than I’d expected it to be.  It’s certainly of a larger scale than the first Shazam! film.  There are a number of great action sequences in the film; my favorite is the early scene in which the Shazam family saves people from a collapsing bridge.  That was a wonderfully put-together super-hero action sequence.  In the first film, I complained about the execution of the Seven Deadly Sins, but this film is packed with incredible-looking monsters.  I loved the dragon that Kalypso unleashes, and I loved all the awesome creatures from Greek mythology that get released upon Philadelphia in the third act.  We get to see Cyclopses, Minotaurs, Manticores, Harpies, and more!  They all look really cool.  I was impressed.

I liked that the film launches right into the story at the beginning, as we see Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) find the Wizard’s broken staff (which Shazam snapped in half at the end of the first film), and things move along at a brisk pace from there.  Although the first film ended with all the kids getting super-powers, I like that this film picks up with the gang having trouble working together.  That makes sense and feels like a logical next step in the story.  Over-all, this sequel fits very well with the first film and flows smoothly.

The cast is once again great.  Zachary Levi is a tremendous amount of fun as Shazam.  He brings a wonderfully joyous, boisterous energy to every scene.  I love watching this character, so different from all the other grim and gritty heroes we’ve been seeing in the last several years worth of DC movies.  I wish that Asher Angel got more screen-time as Billy Batson (in his regular, non-superhero form).  He was great in the first film but doesn’t have much to do here.   Zachary Levi gets all the fun stuff.  Billy/Shazam is the titular character, but this film really belongs to Freddy Freeman.  We get to spend a lot more time with Freddy in human form than we do with Billy, and Jack Dylan Grazer (It) is a lot of fun to watch in the role.  Adam Brody (who I so enjoyed in the recent TV adaptation of Fleishman is in Trouble) is also a lot of fun as Freddy in super-hero form.  It’s fun to see the contrast between the puffed-up super-hero version of Freddy, and his regular human self.  Grace Caroline Currey is solid as Mary, and it’s fun to see that, in this film, Ms. Currey plays both the human and super-hero versions of Mary!  (Rachel Borth played the super-hero version of Mary at the end of the first Shazam! film.)  I wish Mary actually had anything to do in the film.  Faithe Herman remains adorable as Darla, and I laughed at her “taste the rainbow!” moment.  Meagan Good is terrific as the super-hero version of Darla; Ms. Goode really captures that this adult-looking character is still a little girl.  (I loved the bit in which she saves some cats before she saves their human owners.)  Jovan Armand and D. J. Cotrona are both great as the human & super-hero versions of Pedro, as are Ian Chen and Ross Butler as the two versions of Eugene.  I wish they all had more to do in the film, but all four actors are so enjoyable that they make the most of their limited screen time.  Same goes for Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews, who play Billy & co.’s foster parents Rosa and Victor Vásquez.

Helen Mirren is an incredible actress and she’s a wonderful choice to play Hespera.  She’s amazing at making Hespera’s faux-ancient style of speech work and sound great.  Lucy Liu is always enjoyable, and she’s fun here as Kalypso.  I wish the film allowed Ms. Liu more notes to play than just being angry all the time.  Rachel Zegler is solid as Anne.  I thought she was great in her scenes with Freddy in school.  But Ms. Zegler has such a modern feel to her performance that I didn’t quite buy her when the film pivoted and put her character in more cosmic situations.

I was happy to see Djimon Hounsou back as the Wizard Shazam (even though they killed him off in the first film and can’t be bothered to explain here how he survived being turned into ash).  Mr. Hounsou is fun as the character, and I loved his dynamic with Freddy.  Those were some of my favorite scenes in the film.

Ready to dig in further?  Please beware some slight SPOILERS in what lies ahead.

I freely admit that the film has some problems right off the bat.  First off, it took too long to make and release this film.  I think that audience enthusiasm for the first film, which came out four years ago, has dimmed.  And the film has the misfortune of being released in a weird limbo-time for the DC films.  We know that the previous continuity of DC films (the “Snyderverse”) is ending, and that James Gunn & Peter Safran have started working on a whole new connected series of DC films and TV shows.  (Click here to read my thoughts on all of the recently-announced DC projects!)  Shazam! Fury of the Gods is caught in the middle, and thus there’s a weird sense that this film is a lame duck that doesn’t really matter.  All of this surely hurt the film at the box office.  I also think it’s a problem in the film itself that the kids have gotten too old.  There’s a weird visual disconnect watching this film, it that I think all the kids look older than they’re supposed to be.  (This is particularly a problem with Asher Angel, the actor who plays Billy, who to my eye looks way too old for this character.)

As with the first film, I’m surprised how dark and violent the film is at times.  I think both Shazam! films should have been rated PG, and should have toned down the violence and horror to make the films more palatable to younger viewers.  The idea of a super-hero version of Big is such a good idea!!  It seems strange to me that both films have been so scary that I don’t think they’re appropriate for younger kids.  This sequel film goes to some really dark places.  There’s a huge body-count in this film.  The movie opens by showing us the horrible deaths of a crowd full of museum-goers.  The docent (played by Schitt’s Creek’s Rizwan Manji, who also played a janitor on Peacemaker) is brutally killed.  I couldn’t believe they had the kindly teacher played by Diedrich Bader forced by Kalypso to commit suicide!!  And there must have been hundreds of people killed in all the chaos in Philadelphia in the third act.  As an adult viewer, I enjoyed that this film was unafraid to go to such dark places.  But at the same time, I felt that this was the wrong tone for a Shazam! film.

While I had fun watching this film, its biggest weakness is that it’s very superficial.  We don’t get as deeply into any of the characters as I’d hoped we would.  These are fun archetypes, and they’re played by an array of terrific actors; so the film is able to still be enjoyable — at least it was for me.  But I wanted to go deeper.  How do any of the other kids feel about having superpowers?  Do they love them?  Do they think they’re a burden?  Many of them seem disinterested or ambiguous about their powers at the start of the film; I wish the film’s finale had better depicted them all embracing their powers and working as a team.  (I really wish we’d seen more team-work from the gang in the third act.  I think it’s mistake that, after they get the unicorns, we barely see them in the film’s climax, and also that they’re separated from Billy, so we never get to see them really functioning as a team.)  The film has an interesting idea that Billy feels “impostor syndrome,” feeling that he’s unworthy of these powers.  I wish that factored more deeply into the story, and that we’d seen Billy wrestling more with his feelings of self-worth.  (We’re told at the end of the movie that the reason Billy is so focused on the family always using their powers together is that he doesn’t think he’s good enough on his own — and that’s a great scene and an interesting idea — but I wanted to actually see that play out in the film.)  Freddy and Anne jump from meeting in school to being deeply in love too quickly; I’d like to have seen more of their relationship.  Anne loves Freddy because of who he is, not his powers.  It’d have been nice to have seen that be more a part of the story, to see Freddy have to learn that he has worth even without powers or his reputation as the kid who had lunch with Superman.  Poor Mary has nothing to do in the film.  There’s a moment in which she admits that she was out partying the night before; it’d have been nice to have seen that, to have gotten a sense of where she is at in her life and how she feels about her new life as a superhero.  I loved the foster parents Rosa and Victor in the first film, and they’re fun here too, but I’d have loved to have seen the film give us more of their points of view.  Are they worried about their kids, who are acting all mysterious (because they’re off fighting crime as superheroes)?  Once they discover the truth, how do they feel about it?  Are you detecting a trend in my comments? (There’s also a weird scene in which the kids burst in on Victor and Rosa in bed; why don’t any of the kids have any reaction to seeing their parents in their underwear?)  The script seems to continually skip over these moments that had the potential to be more.

I don’t understand the film’s story as well as I should.  The set-up is confusing to me.  We’re told that all the Gods are dead, but didn’t we see Hades as the villain in the first Wonder Woman film?  We’re told that the Wizard’s staff prevents magic from working in our realm, but didn’t we see in Black Adam that Doctor Fate has been operating for decades?  Even putting aside any continuity problems with those other movies, and just looking at this film on its own, I still have lots of questions.  For instance: how did the Daughters of Atlas survived whatever happened to all the other Gods in the past?  Where have they been all this time?  Once they get the Wizard’s staff back, how do the powers in that staff connect to the powers in the apple and the seed they use to recreate their magical realm?  Why are there so many Macguffins?  What exactly are the powers of the Daughters of Atlas?  We see that Kalypso (Lucy Liu’s character) can whisper into someone’s ear and control them.  In the opening scene, it’s cool and very scary how that evil-whispering seems to spread from one person to another like a virus.  But then, weirdly, that never happens again for the rest of the movie!  We see that Anthea can somehow warp the environment around her (in a visual effect reminiscent of both Inception and the Mirror Dimension from Doctor Strange), but is she actually warping reality or is she just messing with the perception of the people around her?  What powers does Hespera (Helen Mirren) possess beyond being a tough fighter?  I wish I understood all of this better.

I hated the end-of-the-movie fake-out in which Billy is “killed” only to be brought back a few minutes later.  Ugh.  Can we stop doing this in movies and TV shows, please??  I hate this fake-drama garbage.  It’s clear they weren’t actually going to kill off the movie’s teenaged main character.  So don’t try to wring emotion about of the audience with this sort of pretend plot twist.

Other thoughts:

• I laughed at the mid-movie sequence in which we see Wonder Woman’s body with a different head.  That was a funny play on the headless Superman who appeared at the end of the first Shazam! film (when, for whatever reason, they were unable to get Henry Cavill to reprise the role.)
• It was fun to see Gal Gadot actually return as Wonder Woman at the end of the film.  But I wish I thought her appearance worked better than it did.  I don’t like that Wonder Woman is used as a “get out of jail free card” plot twist to resurrect Billy.  How could she be able to do that??  It doesn’t make any sense.  And having Wonder Woman just appear by walking around the corner (as opposed to, I don’t know, flying into the scene, or landing her invisible plane, or something cool like that) made the scene feel cheap and small… and like what it actually was, which was clearly something quickly filmed in one day.
• I liked “Steve” the intelligent pen.
• I think it’s pretty hilarious that the first Shazam! film didn’t actually explain that the letters in the name Shazam were an acronym, so I was happy to see that spelled out here.
• It’s a little goofy that the characters don’t know what Billy Batson’s superhero name actually is until the end of this second film, but it fits in with the general difficulties DC Comics has had in having a definitive name for this character (who began as Captain Marvel, but then they lost the copyright for that name to Marvel Comics).
• I thought the room in the Rock of Eternity with all the doors was very cool (albeit derivative of Monsters, Inc.) — I wish the doors had factored more heavily into the film’s story.
• Being a huge Peacemaker fan, I loved seeing Economos and Harcourt (Steve Agee and Jennifer Holland) in the mid-credits scene.  That was a very funny scene, and I loved hearing Shazam question why there are two different super-hero teams that both have “Justice” in their names (the Justice League and the Justice Society).  But as I’d commented in my review of Black Adam, I don’t understand how or why Amanda Waller would be in charge of the Justice Society team of super-heroes.  And it seemed weird seeing these two very adult characters from a very adult show crossing over with Shazam.  (There’s a lot of cursing in this scene, which was very funny, and right on-brand for Economos and Harcourt, but very weird to me to see in a Shazam! film.)
• I also enjoyed the post-credits scene, in which Mark Strong returned as Dr. Sivana, and we picked up the thread from the first-movie’s post-credits scene, in which Dr. Sivana met the classic Shazam villain Mister Mind.  It’s weird to me that both these credits scenes tease future Shazam adventures that we know will likely never happen.  But I do think it’s amazing that this Dr. Sivana/Mister Mind scene is in itself something of a parody of super-hero movie post-credit scenes that don’t actually go anywhere.  I thought that was pretty funny.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t perfect, but I enjoyed it and I’m glad to have seen it.  I think it’s a better film than the reviews and box-office would suggest.  I’d love to see more of these actors playing these characters.  I’m bummed that that will now likely never happen.

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