Of any superhero movie, Shazam! should have gotten its sequel out as fast as possible, and the reason for this is fairly logistic. Kids grow fast and when your premise centres on the novelty of a child who can turn into an adult superhero you’ve got a limited span of time before that feature is lost to a young adult simply turning into a slightly older adult. It’s one of the areas where comics have a clear advantage over film, and it’s something I imagine had to be on director David L. Sandberg’s mind as production on his Shazam! sequel was delayed by more than a year due to the pandemic. And in the finished film it is noticeable how grown-up Billy Batson and the other kids are, Asher Angel in particular looking about old enough to be the superhero in his own right.
And I hate to think that this is why he has significantly less screen time than he did in the first movie, his character staying in Zachary Levi Shazam-mode for the vast majority of the film. In fact it’s notable that the only member of the Shazam family to be himself for the bulk of the story is Freddy -Jack Dylan Grazer being both believable as a teenager and someone who the creatives were clearly smart enough to realize was a breakout star of the first film. If they had remembered the other strengths of that film and built on them, Fury of the Gods would have been a more consistent and fulfilling experience than it was.
The second Shazam! is preoccupied with mythos to a fault -and I do mean mythos in the original Grecian sense, as its trifecta of villains and their many third act minions are drawn wholesale from the Greek pantheon -something which by now is no stranger to the crumbling DC movie universe. They are the daughters of Atlas, who in a seeming mixture of mythologies are after the golden apple from the Tree of Life, and have come to Philadelphia to take it from the champions of Shazam -who the movie wants to make clear again is the Wizard played by Djimon Hounsou and not the foster family that fights crime by saying his name. There’s also some revenging going on related to unforeseen consequences of Billy breaking that staff at the end of the last movie.
It’s convoluted and it’s not engaging -the major plot threads of this movie being overly dense and bereft of much drama. It’s also a lot of material beyond this movie’s wheelhouse of comfort –even Sandberg and his writers don’t seem much invested in the cosmic stakes and mythology if their overt dependence on jokiness to diffuse dramatic tension is anything to go by. In tone it really plays up that “Marvel movie in a DC universe” identity the earlier movie was accused of, and in the worst of ways. Conversely, the real character drama and spontaneity of concept that worked so well in that earlier film, is pushed to the sidelines –indeed Billy Batson’s arc is so poorly handled that an otherwise well-composed emotional climax is completely drained of resonance.
Which is doubly frustrating because the movie features as small beats or subplots several richer albeit humbler themes to focus on. At a point in the first act the narrative seriously hones in on Billy’s anxiety about aging out of the foster system, being forced to leave the family that has come to mean so much to him, and more emphatically his fear that he and Freddy are drifting apart. It is a natural follow-up on his issues and insecurities from the first movie, and matches the honesty of them well. But after a single scene, this facet of his character struggle is ignored until the eleventh hour, by which point it no longer means anything. Add to that the fact these complexes are expressed more through adult Shazam Billy than teenager Billy and they lose much of their emotional potency as well. The significance of that family unit is likewise underplayed for how much the movie would tell us it is vital, despite the “Shazamily” having much more screen-time in this entry. Whether in kid or adult form, each boils down to essentially a single character trait: cute, smart, mature, closeted -and it does all of their performers a disservice.
Then there’s the matter of Freddy’s storyline, which deals prominently with a burgeoning romance between him and a new girl at school Anne (Rachel Zegler), impressed by his resolve in the face of bullies. It’s quaint perhaps to a fault and not very original, but Grazer and Zegler have chemistry and there’s the outline of a nice teen rom-com there; but it too becomes reduced before long, subsumed by the overarching ventures, and though it retains a modest effectiveness it loses a degree of its charm.
That itself is something the movie is in short supply of as it slogs through its dry plot and often laboured humour. The bit from the trailer about throwing a bus at a dragon was thankfully cut from the movie, but it is still representative of the movie’s general approach to its comic relief -which includes a sequence purely incorporated to evoke a years-old meme that plays about as well as you would expect for something clearly mandated by a committee of sixty year-old white men. Sometimes a sharp gag or good delivery cuts through, it’s not so awkward as the worst of Marvel’s efforts, but it often suffers from playing off a level of immaturity that doesn’t correspond to the characters. And it’s a problem that extends to their general personalities. Most of these kids are in their late teens but the Shazam personas still reflect the attitudes and outlooks of hyperactive young adolescents, especially pertaining to Billy who couldn’t be further in characterization from his Zachary Levi counterpart. This was noticeable in the first movie too, but it is even more pronounced here, and it emphasizes all the more a reliance on gimmick. There’s a scene where Shazam Billy dictates a letter to a magic pen that is played in a way that would insult the intelligence of any seventeen-year-old.
As a result of these traits, the movie’s earnest efforts are marginalized. Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu are sleepwalking through the film and Levi is arguably guilty of overcompensating his material at times, but the performances are otherwise solid. It’s nice to see Djimon Hounsou, his role expanded from the last movie, clearly having a good time, and Grazer once again carries the weaker material. It’s also clear that Sandberg is fighting to assert his distinctive choices in the tone of the darker or more violent moments, such as in the opening scene where the sisters attack the Acropolis Museum and in the brutal death of an innocent bystander at the school. And there is intelligent craft, in both script and technique, to the major emotional beats of the climax. It might have been great if it felt at all earned.
There is an ending to the film that in hindsight would have been a nice way to put a cap on a series that has no future. But of course closure can never come in these comic book movies so it is nullified in a horribly cheap and lazy way. It stings as both a transparent staple of the machine of superhero continuity and as the last cynical note on a film that had just enough going for it that every disappointment felt all the greater. The signature accomplishment of this Shazam! may well be in highlighting the merits of the first movie. While they’re being lumped together for their floundering box offices, paired by commentators as a sign of real superhero fatigue, I don’t think Fury of the Gods and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania are very comparable, dissatisfying to various degrees though they both are. But their one shared fault is in taking for granted what made their predecessors work to begin with beyond merely the superhero formula and requirements of a larger universe. There’s something to be said for the familiarity of distinction, especially for these titles related to non-household names; and as superhero movies lose sight of that in a high stakes-driven, inter-connective swamp, the more they resemble Billy Batson, who would rather die than grow up.
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