What’s it about?
The continued adventures of Billy Batson as he and his superpowered family find their feet as a team of heroes, and encounter powerful Gods from the Greek pantheon that are seeking a thing so that they can do a thing.
What’d we think?
Peter Linning says: The first Shazam was a refreshingly light-hearted entry into DC’s patchy collection of superhero films, and while a lot of the same elements are present this time around, the sequel falls flat, flops around for a bit, and then rolls into a gutter. The plot is pretty standard “villains seeking a magical artifact” stuff, the core cast of kids are pretty good, and Helen Mirren provides a little bump to the proceedings, but for a movie where its parts are only okay at best, the end result is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
It’s largely inoffensive for the first two acts, being packed with jokes that were never enough to make me laugh, but didn’t have me rolling my eyes either. It could have passed with a “not great, not terrible, I’m just not the target market” right up until the wheels fall off in the movie’s last 15 minutes. Instead of just ending the movie neatly after the climactic action sequence, there’s a few scenes tacked onto the ending that are so disjointed that it feels as if some deleted scenes were just thrown in to tick some boxes that DC required to be ticked.
It’s forgettable at best, and everything that’s wrong with DC movies at its worst. Still better than Black Adam though.
3/10
Geena Schwartz says: The most exciting part of this movie was seeing Helen Mirren in the first five minutes, and it was all downhill after that. ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ is a cookie-cutter structure filled with cheesy, awkward one-liners that don’t exactly fail to land, but crash into the ground and burst into flames. The storyline is uninspiring, and the dialogue may have been forgivable 20 years ago but in 2023 is simply cringeworthy. Most of the movie’s gags never come close to hitting their mark, and the ending left me with the same feeling that I get when waiting at the supermarket checkout. The core actors did what they could with the script, Meagan Good in particular bringing warmth and playfulness to her otherwise one-dimensional role, and Jack Dylan Grazer continues to show plenty of promise, but at the end of the day the trope of awkward kids in adult bodies is tired and boring
I didn’t hate it, but can’t recall anything I liked about it either. I won’t be recommending this to anyone, but I also won’t be telling anyone not to see it – likely because I’ll have forgotten about it by the time I wake up tomorrow.
3/10
