Shazam: Fury of the Gods

After the dreary mess that was Black Adam, it’s nice to have a filmmaker who has a basic understanding of structure taking the helm of a film. Granted, the Shazam sequel is still overstuffed and confused, but at least David F. Sandberg is able to take the script by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan and come out of production and editing with something resembling a cohesive story going on. It helps that he actually allows his star to have a bit of fun, as well, but while this may be the height of the nadir of the DCEU in terms of its late period, it’s still part of that nadir. For some of its charm and basic storytelling competence, it’s still not very good.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel and Zachary Levi) and his foster family are still working out the kinks of their superpowers in Philadelphia. Saving everyone from a collapsing bridge, they can’t save the bridge itself, for instance. At the same time, Billy is clinging desperately to the other five he has given powers to, refusing to allow them their own lives. This mostly manifests around Mary (Grace Caroline Currey) who has aged out of the foster system, has a job, wants to go to college, but still lives in the foster house, and Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer and Adam Brody) who can’t get away to have his own social life. Meanwhile, two daughters of Atlas, Hespera (Hellen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) steal a broken magic staff from a museum in Greece and force the apparently still living Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) into reassembling it. This gives them great power and sets them on the quest to find the Golden Apple which will restore their world.

So, the immediate problem I have with the film’s overarching path is that it splits its narrative between two characters: Billy and Freddy. They have vastly different paths that only intersect because Billy doesn’t want Freddy to leave him (along with the rest of the family). Billy is controlling, but it gets largely forgotten for long stretches. Freddy gets something like a girlfriend in the new girl at school, Anne (Rachel Zegler), who ends up being Anthea, the third daughter of Atlas.

The plot ends up being the daughters wanting the powers that Billy and his friends have to fully power the staff in order to find the Apple and reinvigorate their world. There’s an interesting approach where the three have different end-desires and approaches. Anthea ends up attached to the human world because of Freddy. Hespera is the oldest and wisest (though, seriously, Anthea is 6,000 years old herself, so how many more years of wisdom does Hespera have on her two younger sisters?) and wants to get the Apple and leave. Kalypso is the hothead of the bunch and wants to take vengeance for their thousands of years of imprisonment on humanity as a whole, doing a terraforming thing upon Earth (this franchise loved the terraforming angle).

There’s some lightly amusing stuff about a magic pen that the foster family uses for research. Billy gets moments to mug in negotiations with Hespera. The second half of the film, though, is essentially one extended actions sequence as Kalypso unleashes the power of the Apple, plants the new Tree of Life in the middle of Citizens Bank Park, and the family has to navigate between the world of the gods, Philadelphia, saving the Wizard, fighting a dragon, getting new allies, losing powers, and using Skittles to recruit unicorns to fight on their side.

Yeah, it’s overstuffed. However, at least there’s a clear path in the middle of all of this where a bad guy wants to do a bad thing, and the good guys have to band together to fight. I cared about little of it, but it was slightly amusing here and there while the story played out.

I can see why Levi was really mad at the financial failure of the film. He put his all into this. His all isn’t Olivier, but he’s straining for every laugh and getting more than a few of them. The rest of the cast is somewhere between okay (like Mirren, sleepwalking through it though her sleepwalking is still decent) and terrible (Liu is just the worst here).

Essentially, I feel like this isn’t that big of a story. At over two-hours, it struggles to justify its length, and that struggle creates tangents that don’t pay off very well. Heck, a good portion of the tangents are Skittles and Phillies commercials. Still, it has a decent throughline and some laughs along the way. It’s not good. It’s not as good as the first Shazam. However, it’s…okay.

Rating: 2/4