Shazam! Fury of the Gods 2023

While I have already technically watched the other 2 final movies of the DCEU which came out in late summer and December of the same year as this film which was originally released in March. This is MY final DCEU catch up movie and while it had its ups and downs, I don’t think there was ever any movie that I actively disliked. There are many of them that have some serious issues, but also every single one of them had something that I enjoyed in them. This was the follow up to the very fun Shazam! movie that mixed a lot of immature humor that came from having a 14 year old playing an adult superhero mixed with some pretty dark horror-esque monster imagery. This sequel basically copies that same structure despite the fact that it’s been four years and while Billy Batson is nearly 18, he still basically acts like he’s still 14. The villains were trying to be a mix of scary and sympathetic that didn’t fully work, but I do love me some Greek mythology references and the film did make me laugh out loud a fair number of times so it wasn’t a bad film at all in my book.

This sequel takes place four years after the first Shazam! movie and pretty early on the film introduces what’s changed in the lives of our heroes. They aren’t exactly taking to the heroism like the other DC heroes and they are referred to by the news as the Philadelphia Fiascos as they are still struggling to work as a team and minimize collateral damage though they do make a point to share that there were no casualties in the opening bridge disaster scene. Billy is still struggling to be the leader as he is seeing a pediatrician as a psychiatrist, and is struggling with potential feelings of abandonment as he is about to turn 18 and age out of the foster system. This is shown relatively well with the combination of his forcefully adhering to the “all or none” mantra where all six siblings go superhero together, and yet he still calls his foster mother by her name rather than by Mom.

Where the first movie was about Billy and Freddy’s friendship with a good mix of both young and super-powered Billy sharing the screen, this movie has a much stronger focus on Shazam, with Asher Angel getting minimal screen time, though Jack Dylan Grazer still gets a fair amount of screen time as young Freddy as he spends much of the run time being forcefully de-powered by the villains. The rest of the Marvel family (despite never being called that on screen, merely a single suggestion of Captain Marvel from a bystander) are generally superfluous and spend roughly equal time between their powered and young roles, though only a couple get any significant character moments as Mary seems to have abandoned college, Pedro has a couple moments about being gay, and Darla still feels written too young for the four year time jump but has a couple moments about kittens and unicorns including a couple of the funniest lines involving Skittles.

The villains are the three daughters of Atlas who come for the staff that gave Shazam and family their powers, which this movie explains was done by stealing the powers of the various Greek gods. The oldest and youngest, Hespera and Anthea are also looking for the seed of life to restore the plane of the gods which was their prison locked away from magic while the middle sister Kalypso wants to use it for revenge and destroy the human plane of existence. None of the three villains are all that interesting, though Rachel Zegler as Anthea does make things more interesting by initially appearing as Anne where she falls for young Freddy. And there’s another fun meta moment when she reveals that she’s 6,000 years old instead of a teenager before kissing Freddy when the parents say that makes things more inappropriate. Kalypso feels like she could have caused the most chaos though she only uses her powers a couple times and they also get undercut by Freddy’s strong will and ability to resist it. Anne’s powers felt very Doctor Strange-esque and were visually interesting every time she used them, but she also didn’t do very much with them. The fights were decent, but also haphazard in several areas, especially the final battle between Shazam and Kalypso on Lagon.

One of the more interesting choices in this film was to bring back the Wizard in an expanded role after he was seemingly destroyed in the first movie. He was one of the most fun characters, especially with his bickering chemistry with Freddy. The climax of the movie seemed like it was taking forever to happen along with all the other things that had to fall into place, though it was great to see their interpretations of various mythological creatures including the fact that they start out with a manticore. It was also weird how dark the movie went in a couple places like how they unceremoniously killed off the nice teacher by having him jump off the roof via Kalypso’s mind control. It also didn’t make sense when they were trying to follow Hespera into the room of doors and were seemingly just trying random doors despite the earlier scene showing that one of the Marvel fam had been meticulously cataloguing the doors including the one that Shazam tried. The biggest failing of this movie is that it had a few too many lanes and never picked one long enough to do it well. The villains were slightly sympathetic and slightly dangerous, but were partially defeated or turned pretty easily, Billy and Freddy had their arcs but especially Billy’s felt superfluous and the rest of the fam barely had any characterization at all, the humor was fun but overly silly at times, and the horror elements were interesting but also felt scaled back. It just tried to be too many things so that it didn’t do any of them well enough to really punch it home and made them all fairly mediocre. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.