A film that was dead in the water before it was ever released.
Warner Brothers have spent the last 10 years trying to catch up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe only to watch the overwhelming majority of their films flop at the box office before selling the company to Discovery.
Last year, it was confirmed that James Gunn is being given the keys to the vehicle which is the DC Cinematic Universe. We won’t see Gunn’s vision realized for another two to three years but we know for sure that anything that was announced before James Gunn’s announcement no longer matters.
Warner Bros made the decision to push Shazam 2 back from it’s November release in order to promote ‘Black Adam’ and ‘Don’t Worry Darling.’ Needless to say, it wasn’t a smart decision.
Or perhaps maybe it was.
Warner Brothers had to have known that there was virtually no hype for a second Shazam movie leading up to the film’s release. This is why we’re sitting here many months later after the film has performed lower than anyone’s expectations to blame the one true reason why no one is interested in watching Shazam 2… Dwayne The Rock Johnson. Right?
Two years after the events of the last Shazam movie, Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), two of the daughters of the Titan Atlas, break into the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece to steal the Wizard’s staff which was broken at the end of the last movie. The two then take it to the Wizard, imprisoned in the Gods’ Realm, and force him to repair the staff and activate its powers.
The daughters now have the ability to steal their powers back from the “Shazamily” who are now running around the city of Philadelphia as freedom fighters. But their days of being one big happy crime-fighting family are coming to an end.
‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ isn’t a bad movie that certainly isn’t a good one either. The best word to describe this movie is painfully average.
For whatever reason, the filmmakers decide to focus the majority of this film on the Shazam family rather than the title character himself. The only problem is that out of the several different Shazam clones in the film, only two have any actual personality. The character of Freddie Freeman played by Jack Dylan Grazer is the best one by far. He is the only character with any true personality in the film. His screen time is short in the grand scheme of things but he is one of the few characters that the audience truly identified with.
Grace Caroline Currey plays the character of Mary in this film, while her acting isn’t the strongest that the film has to offer, she certainly has a screen presence worthy of bigger roles down the line.
The failures of this film lie in Zachary Levi’s portrayal of Shazam, a character who despite being almost 18 years old is betrayed as a 6-year-old in Levi’s performance. The fatal flow of the movie is that there are way too many cooks in this kitchen. The film presents about seven superheroes along with three different villains.
There’s no focus within the movie and as a result, largely nothing happens giving audiences a roller coaster that never dips or rises throughout the course of the ride.
It is without question we are in the dying days of the DCEU, Warner Bros has so little faith in this film that they pretty much told audiences to give up on it before it was ever released. The end result is a film that doesn’t allow To to regret the decision and does everything to affirm that ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ is one of the most empty superhero films of the last decade.
1.5/5
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