Movie Review – Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Director: David Sandberg

Starring: Zachary Levi, Jack Dylan Grazer, Rachel Zegler

Year: 2023

Shazam! was the surprise of the comic book movie world a few years ago, a complete blindside for DC in the way that Deadpool was for Marvel a few years earlier.  It was fun, fresh, funny, basically everything that DC had not been producing so far in its DCEU history, and fans were completely in.  Four years later comes Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and, unfortunately, everything they did right the first time around they got wrong the second.  This is exactly the type of action movie we don’t want to see, and what’s even more disappointing is how we thought they understood that.

Now that Billy has shared his powers with his foster siblings, they are the super team of Philadelphia …or at least they’re trying to be.  They’re not very good yet, and Billy doesn’t know how to lead, so the team flounders and the rifts grow wider.  Meanwhile, back in the land of the Gods, some very angry superbeings are waking, and they want their magic powers back.  So a clash between two worlds is set, and our super team better get their act together, because they’ll have to work as one to save humanity.

Wow was it bad.  It was everything cheap and stupid the first one avoided, and how they didn’t know how to avoid it the second time is beyond me.  Teamwork beating all, families coming together, an evil dragon, the destruction of a bridge, the destruction of a baseball field, a lot of monsters, so many broken brick pillars; it was so stupid, it’s hard to put into words.  The acting was awful, Levi played the character way too dumb, Lucy Liu & Helen Mirren were an embarrassment, and, just, everything was so recycled it hardly resembled a movie any more.  Sandberg should be ashamed of his effort this time out; Shazam 2 is a nightmare.

My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆