Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Director: David F. Sandberg
Quick Impressions:
As we drove home from the theater, my daughter said wisely, “I started to like the movie once it stopped trying to make sense.”
“When was that?” I asked, nearly positive she meant when the dragon came.
“When the dragon came,” she assured me with a wise nod.
I loved the first Shazam! It surprised me by being unexpectedly compelling. What a deliciously dark introduction to the villain! That early Magic 8 Ball scene is so gripping. Even back in 2019, I already had a touch of superhero fatigue. And I was positive the guy sitting next to me had a fever and was going to give it to me—which happened. My husband would always combat my fears of communicable illness at the movie theater by pointing out that no matter how much anybody coughed, I never got sick from going. That time I did. Still, I thought, “It was worth it. That was a great movie.”
Fortunately, no one was sitting next to me this time but my daughter because though Shazam! Fury of the Gods has its moments, it’s not worth getting an upper respiratory infection. We enjoyed our trip to the theater, but I watched the early scenes of this film in growing dismay. It has some delightful components, but for whatever reason, they don’t come together as well as they could. My fourteen-year-old and I had pretty much the same take. We had a good time hanging out together, but we simultaneously wanted both more and less from the film. I was a very sympathetic audience, eager to be pleased since I liked the first movie so much, but this one didn’t quite work for me.
I would, however, still watch a third movie (though I find it concerning that most of the kids are basically adults at this point. Asher Angel is the young Billy Batson. He’s already twenty! And Zachary Levi is 42. Is it advantageous for a young man in his twenties to transform into a man in his mid-forties? Does that seem like a change that would make someone stronger, healthier, more fit? The premise starts to get a little weird once Billy is already an adult.) This time the actress who plays Billy’s older sister Mary (Grace Caroline Currey) has already started playing the super hero version of herself, too. But I don’t think you’d want to lose Angel or Levi (or Jack Dylan Grazer or Adam Brody, for that matter).I guess the audience just has to agree to suspend disbelief.
The Good:
Helen Mirren is the best part of this movie. I say that only because she makes almost all of her material work no matter how ridiculous it is. There’s a protracted set up for a joke about a magic pen that Billy and his siblings are learning how to use, and it’s not as fun to watch as it should be. But when Mirren’s character reads aloud the letter they have written her, that’s funny. She also gets a tense conversation with Shazam that’s pleasant to watch. (In fact, listening to her character explain her point of view, I thought, “You know, I think she’s right. What she wants is perfectly reasonable, and they don’t know what they’re doing anyway. They should give her what she wants. The end.”) Almost all of my favorite moments in this movie came from Helen Mirren. Sometimes even small choices (like the way she carries a certain object with a little flourish) enhance her performance. Lucy Liu is very entertaining, too.
I’m also still a huge fan of the foster parents, Victor and Rosa Vasquez (played by Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans). They’re not in this movie much until the end, and yet they made me laugh at least three times. The characters are extremely likeable (if not always practical) people. They have hearts of gold. And the actors have great timing. Their jokes almost always work. They’re not even especially remarkable jokes, but they work.
As was the case in the first film, Jack Dylan Grazer is excellent as young Freddy Freeman. It’s pretty hard not to like Freddy. (I think he got better material in the first film since it spent so much time on the bond/conflict between Freddy and Billy, but Grazer is good in the role, and the character is always interesting.)
I also thought Rachel Zegler made a good addition to the cast. I liked her in West Side Story. Yes, Tony and Maria are the weakest part of that film (largely because of their lack of chemistry), but the problem is mostly Tony. She was great in her scenes with Ariana DeBose, and I thought her performance of “I Feel Pretty” was a big improvement on the 1961 film version. I’m happy to see her in something else. (My daughter was less enthusiastic, but the problems she pointed out are all with the character, not the actress.)
Zachary Levi is an engaging lead, but (this is a weird thing to say about the lead) I think he gets too much screentime. I wish we got to see Billy Batson a bit more and Shazam a bit less. For one thing, Shazam being around so much makes his appearances less special. Also it seems to be putting too much pressure on Levi to be entertaining and funny when he doesn’t actually seem to have much material to work with. In this movie, his jokes miss as often as they hit. I do like Levi in the role, though.
The movie also has a good moral (though it may be delivered awkwardly). And there’s a deus-ex-machina ending that’s to-die-for. (The five year old within me was mildly thrilled by this ending) (even though the rest of me wonders, “Well, where the were you when all the rest of this stuff was happening?”)
Best Action Sequence:
Once the dragon shows up, the movie gets a lot better. Suddenly, it becomes incredibly fun to watch, even though the actions of the characters start making less and less sense. There’s a fantastic moment that took us both by surprise and reminded me of a similarly startling event in the movie Deep Blue Sea.
There’s also a pretty great scene featuring the dragon crashing through an entire building which reminded me fondly of that scene in Transformers 3 where everyone falls down an entire building (for quite some time). I haven’t thought about that in years, so the memory brought a smile to my face.
The parents are a huge highlight in these dragon-centric scenes.
Best Scene:
I do like the talk between Levi and Mirren when Hespera shows up to negotiate. Shazam’s Fast and the Furious line is one of the film’s better jokes.
Best Scene Visually:
One thing did impress me about this film. Fairly early on, we get a scene featuring Billy’s nightmare. He awakens and looks over at his plasma globe (sometimes called a wizard’s ball). Then much later, near the end of the film, we get a lovely visual echo of the plasma globe (even nicer because what happens after this refers back to the events of Billy’s dream). For me, this may have been the strongest moment of the entire movie. It’s an elegant visual flourish that filled me with happiness as I thought, “Okay, so these two movies were made by the same people, after all,” because that initial scene with the villain in the first movie was similarly well constructed (and also involved a spooky children’s toy).
The Negatives:
“I hate to say this,” I told my daughter, “but some of the emotional story beats don’t feel earned.” (I hate to say it because it sounds both pretentious and clichéd. But unfortunately, it is true.) (I don’t think I’ve ever had to say that before! If I were the director or the screenwriter, I would want to punch somebody who popped up just to say, “That didn’t feel earned.” I would be like, “Excuse me, who are you?” But I kept thinking it over and over again, in such dismay. “Oh no! That doesn’t feel earned.” (That’s not even a phrase I use normally, but it would not stop popping into my head as I watched moments that were meant to be emotional but lacked heft.)
My personal theory is that the movie probably looked better on paper and as it was being filmed, scene by scene than it did when it was all put together. The pacing of the film is often awkward. It feels like something went wrong with the editing. Some storylines are too rushed.
My daughter noted, “Djimon Hounsou and the guy who plays Freddy are both good actors, but their scenes together were not working.” That is absolutely true. There’s a running joke of the wizard (Hounsou) calling Freddy (Grazer) the wrong name (every time, like the way Endora treats Darrin on Bewitched). But it all happens too fast. The original moment doesn’t exactly work, and then the next time he does it comes too soon. When he finally calls him the right name, it doesn’t feel special like it should because the whole bit is rushed into one small section of the movie. This is just one of many instances when we get the sense the audience is supposed to be experiencing payoff that doesn’t really come (or isn’t genuinely felt). We can tell how we’re supposed to respond, but we don’t actually feel that way (or any way).
Another problem is that far too many of the jokes don’t land. As I see it, part of issue here is that as Shazam, Zachary Levi plays the character younger than Asher Angel seems as Billy Batson. (Maybe what’s gone wrong is that the kids grew up too fast.) I kept thinking of my childhood, how Freaky Friday-like body switching movies were all the rage for a while. Some adult actors were much better at playing the kids than others. Some really overdid it. Levi plays the character as if he’s eleven or twelve, but Angel is twenty, and his Billy acts like an older teen.
The first two-thirds of the movie is pretty weak. Weirdly, as my daughter noted, the last third doesn’t care if it makes sense anymore, and that’s when the viewing experience improves.
Last time, I found the villain extremely compelling. We see this kid in a miserable situation, desperately wishing for his life to improve, and then something magical happens to him, but instead of saving him, this culminates in him being told, “You’re not chosen. You’re not worthy.” That’s interesting.
This time the villains seem more generic. My daughter noted, “Aren’t you getting a little tired of the ‘villain steals an artifact’ trope? How many movies like this have opened that way?” She went on and on, getting more and more specific, but I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. The actresses are great to watch and improve the movie immeasurably. But the material they’re working with seems a little thin. By the end, one of them is doing stuff that doesn’t quite make sense. (For a while, she’s hellbent on destroying Philadelphia, which just seems like a weird goal, especially given where she started.)
Similarly, in the first movie, we got to spend lots of time with young Billy Batson as he navigated his traumatic life. This time, we barely get any of young Billy. (That could be because the young actors are aging.) But my daughter had an excellent point, saying, “The first movie was emotionally heavy, and we got to experience these difficult moments along with Billy. This movie makes his trauma into a joke.” She’s right. There’s far too much empty humor—especially because most of the time it isn’t funny. Zachary Levi gets some of the goofiest lines, and a lot of them just don’t work.
Her other big complaint was Rachel Zegler’s character. We essentially agree that the moment this character shows up, it’s pretty hard not to guess her entire character arc. At every turn, she makes exactly the most clichéd, expected choice (or has the most likely characteristic). We could call her entire storyline from the jump.
The other issue for me is that although on paper, the sequel makes sense—in the first one, Billy couldn’t trust his new family and kept running away; in this one, Billy does trust his new family and never wants to let them go—it fumbles in execution. We just don’t feel the emotional heft of most key events the way that we should. I’d guess a stronger movie is buried somewhere inside this one. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but this movie has many strong elements. They just don’t come together in a very satisfying way. The movie has a decent story and a good cast, but they’re not being utilized optimally. Something has gone wrong. The best parts of the movie are getting lost. It’s like you have to put together a satisfying version of the story yourself, and that’s asking a lot of the audience.
Overall:
Shazam! Fury of the Gods disappointed me, but I still like the cast and the basic premise and would absolutely watch a third installment of this franchise.