Shazam! Fury of the Gods doesn’t have nearly as much fun with its characters and dialogue as its 2019 predecessor did. For my money, it has too many bloated action sequences, and the humor misses more than it hits.
Zachary Levi is back again as Shazam/Billy Batson and his family of superheroes who emerge after he says his crusading moniker. This time around, they’re feeling the fatigue of always saving the day, so Billy decides to go on his own fighting crime. That is until he discovers Atlas’ daughters, Hespera and Kalypso (Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu), who have stolen the Wizard’s (Djimon Hounsou) staff.
The family reunites to stop them with help from the Wizard, and they’re treated to some rather bizarre inventions, including a self-writing pen that looks like it could’ve come straight out of a Harry Potter movie. Another artifact the daughters need is something called the Golden Apple which can either resuscitate the Greek world where the daughters come from, or they can use it to conquer the world.
Rachel Zegler from the remake of West Side Story costars as a girl that one of the male heroes has a crush on. He tries to impress her by showing off his superpowers.
Fury of the Gods is a movie that tries to have too much fun with itself, but it ends up not having enough. For one thing, the action sequences suffer from what I call Pinball Machine Syndrome, meaning that sometimes they’re too hard to follow, and we can’t tell who is doing what. Plus, the story seems to be serving the special effects instead of the other way around.
Levi tries to infect the same amount of goofy charm he brought to the first Shazam movie, but the script fails him and the rest of the cast with wannabe thrilling moments punctuated by one-note one-liners.
The 2019 film did a fine job of finding a balance between action and humor, and it allowed Zachary Levi moments of discovery in which he could do something with the character. This sequel turns things up a notch and blasts us with repetitive action. Some of the computer animation works, but other scenes are too cartoonish to take seriously.
Thankfully, the movie was not released in 3D.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is nothing more than a sloppy cash cow that fails to capture the magic of the original.
Grade: C
(Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, and language.)
