David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! offered a minor diversion in the increasingly homogenous landscape of superhero movies, eschewing the deflecting irony with which many properties handle the inherent absurdity of comic book logic. The 2019 film embraced the ridiculousness of its source material, which finds a teenager, Billy Batson (Asher Angel), gifted by an ancient wizard (Hounsou) with the ability of being able to turn into an adult superhero (Zachary Levi) with the utterance of a magic phrase. The film’s unabashed silliness made its slightly chintzy, overly bright look reflective of its childlike optimism.
When it worked, the film rose above its limitations thanks to its winsome charm. Shazam! Fury of the Gods, though, aims for a more epic sweep, resulting in a lavish effects spectacle capped off by a climax that we’ve seen a hundred times before: of characters shooting crackling streams of energy at each other as a city explodes around them from the collateral damage. The darker, grander tone of the action clashes hard with the general atmosphere of goofiness as characters run around in costumes that look like they came from Party City, visible muscle padding and all.
Fury of the Gods’s generic quality is further reflected in how Billy is surrounded by other teens (Jack Dylan Grazer, Ian Chen, Faithe Herman, Grace Fulton, and Jovan Armand) from his foster family who were imbued with identical superpowers at the end of the first film. Their empowerment was the emotional payoff of that story, but having six figures all running around in the same outfits with the same movesets quickly makes everyone seem interchangeable.
That uniformity undermines how much of the story relies on the internal tension of each young character wanting to go their own way, as Billy desires them to function as a team. In the end, none of the teens, save perhaps Grazer’s disabled Freddy, has sufficiently distinct characteristics and ambitions to sustain the viewer’s interest when they’re on screen by their lonesome.
Up against these heroes is a trio of villains, the fabled daughters of Atlas (Rachel Zegler, Lucy Liu, and Helen Mirren), goddesses whose world-destroying powers were stolen by Hounsou’s wizard a millennia ago in order to forge the source of magic that empowers fighters like Levi’s Shazam. This gives them a personal stake in fighting the heroes, but the characters are so underwritten that they quickly fall into recycled patterns of threatening speeches, cold-hearted civilian murder, and, in the case of Zegler’s Anthea, occasional moments of kindness.
The daughters’ skirmishes with the Shazam family quickly expose Sandberg’s limitations as an action filmmaker: Most of the film’s shots are arranged with characters centered in the frame with no dynamic angling between them, and there’s no sense of scale to any of the battle scenes, even as our warring gods are often rendered as small dots zipping around the sky in extreme long shots from the perspective of the suffering mortals on the ground below. The moments of levity that enlivened the first film are here as well, but they feel perfunctory and ill-fitting amid the darker tone with which Sandberg approaches the city-ruining chaos.
The grimmer atmosphere of Fury of the Gods likewise undermines the attempts to maintain the teen-comedy underpinnings of the previous film. Levi’s Tom-Hanks-in-Big approach to his character worked in Shazam! as a teen reckoning not only with sudden adulthood, but his newfound magic powers. But he plays things the same way here despite Billy’s seeming maturation by the end of the first film, effectively resetting the character rather than developing him further. Likewise, the supporting cast brings nothing new to Billy’s family and teammates, recycling the same jokes and, in the case of Freddy, minor pathos from Shazam!.
While it was completed well in advance of the recently announced hard reset of DC’s cinematic universe, Fury of the Gods spins its wheels so pointlessly on every front that it arrives perfectly crafted to be swiftly ignored as the suits at Warner Bros. create an all-new continuity for its comic book properties. Shazam! had an element of surprise on its side with its slightly offbeat whimsicality, but its sequel fails to build on that foundation in any way, sapping the material of its novelty and leaving us with one of the most forgettable superhero movies of recent years.
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this was written by an A.I.