How can something seem so big and so small at the same time?
Shazam: Fury of the Gods crammed everything else possible into its two hours and 10 minutes so why not a conflicting sense of scope and tone?
The sequel to the 2019 DC Comics superhero caper Shazam is bombastic and cacophonous, a relentlessly overstimulating carnival that relies heavily on CGI and a crushing and clanging soundtrack to fake its ambitious scale.
But everything also feels slight, as if the movie, like the superheroes, is kids playing dress-up. The stakes might be high – in theory, the destruction of our realm and the death of everyone on screen – but the peril never feels real.
The first Shazam movie was an origin story, explaining how teenager Billy Batson (Zachary Levi/Asher Angel) was given the powers of the gods, chosen as the champion by a wizard. By the end of that movie, Billy had shared those powers with his foster brothers and sisters.
Now, a few years on, Billy is still uncomfortable with the responsibility of being a superhero, burdened with a strong case of impostor syndrome. He doesn’t understand why he’s worthy of wielding these enormous powers, and, honestly, if a 17-year-old boy has the self-awareness to be questioning that, it’s preferential to the overly confident alternative.
Billy’s main concern though, seems to be fracturing of his found-family unit. His sister Mary (Grace Fulton) is already over 18 and Billy convinced her not go to college so as to not split up their crew. And Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer/Adam Brody) is frequently off doing his own thing, flexing his superhero cred.
Things get even worse when the Daughters of Atlas – Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu) and Anthea (Rachel Ziegler) – find their way out of their dimensional prison and come to Billy’s world, looking for the powers that were stolen from them. The powers that now reside within Billy and his family.
It’s chaos as the sisters tear up the joint, unleashing all hell on earth, including mythical beasts such as minotaurs and manticores. There are some story beats here and there and everywhere but the core of the story is heroes versus villains, and the hero’s journey of understanding their worth and inner strength.
None of it is surprising and some of it is even fun. Director David F. Sandberg and writers Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan lucked out with the casting of Grazer in the first film – the young actor gets an even bigger role in this sequel, making full use of talents.
But Shazam: Fury of the Gods is so tonally confused, you never fully grasp what movie it’s meant to be. Even though the story and script are fine, it fails to tie together the cheesy sentimentality and family hijinks with the (albeit PG) violent extravaganza.
Mirren and Liu are pitched somewhere in between serious villains and high camp – and not having as much fun as Cate Blanchett did in Thor: Ragnarok. Mirren is a superstar, she deserves better than this.
Levi is doing a lot in his performance as a teenager in an adult’s body, and his performance doesn’t match Angel’s. In the rare moments Angel is on screen as the physically teenager Billy, he’s grounded, but when Levi is on screen, it’s as if he’s playing an entirely different character, one who seems both dumber and dopier than the one we met four years ago.
And the visual effects are inconsistent. The movie can pull off a semi-decent dragon and lots of citywide destruction, but it’s as if the team ran out of money so that a crumpling a piece of paper looks about as advanced as the same effect in the first Harry Potter movie released 22 years ago.
The first Shazam movie was a goofy adventure that felt like a throwback to kids movies from the 1980s and 1990s, but this follow-up is trying to do too much and ends up not doing much of anything.
Rating: 2.5/5
Shazam: Fury of the Gods is in cinemas now