Shazam! Fury of the Gods Is a Feast of Ham and Cheese
Right out of the gate, it should be obvious that Shazam! Fury of the Gods is, by design, no cinematic masterpiece. David F. Sandberg, who returns to direct the sequel to 2019’s Shazam! has no pretensions about what his movie is about. It’s mindless fun, sometimes funny, but ultimately aimless, empty, and shallow entertainment that does little to ease the world’s growing collective weariness toward superhero movies.
It doesn’t help that Fury of the Gods doesn’t belong to a larger narrative, deliberately kept ambiguously separate from the DCEU for a myriad of reasons but mostly because Warner Bros., prior to its merger with Discovery, had a revolving door leadership that could never make up its mind about what direction to take its superhero franchises. The latest, under CEO David Zaslav, who has appointed The Suicide Squad director James Gunn to chart a new course for the DCEU, doesn’t include Shazam! in its announced roadmap, giving audiences little impetus to watch it.
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Shazam! in 2019 benefited from toeing the line between being part of the larger narrative and being outside of it. Warner Bros. even then had no idea what it wanted to do with the universe Zack Snyder had built and a planned cameo by Henry Cavill as Superman was reduced to a headless body double which was might have been cute at the time, but did little to reassure fans about the future of the DCEU. Fury of the Gods is more of the same, and they mention practically every superhero by name except Superman, arguably the greatest and most recognizable superhero of them all. It’s awkward and bizarre.
Gal Gadot’s supposedly secret Wonder Woman cameo became a marketing ploy and is easily one of the few parts that work in a film with a lot of parts that don’t. Stretches of the film find the Shazamily standing around talking, as though Sandberg has no idea what to have everyone do, and it bogs the pace down. There’s a great lot of telling and not enough showing, which is frustrating in a film that boasts Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu as its main antagonists.
Multiple scenes at the Rock of Eternity finds the Shazamily simply sitting or standing around discussing things like they’re in a stage play and the actors often appear like they’re waiting for their turn to speak or act. It’s sophomoric direction unexpected from Sandberg (not to be confused with the other Swedish director named David Sandberg, who directed the comedic tour de force Kung Fury), who did a terrific job managing six Shazams in the first film. It also doesn’t help that the behavioral disparity between the kids and their superhero forms is so wide and jarring.
Billy Watson (Asher Angel) acts with maturity and austerity while Shazam! (Zachary Levi) is a total goofball, so it doesn’t feel like they’re the same person at all. It’s a significant departure from the first film, where Levi and Angel act with nearly identical auras and demeanors. In Fury of the Gods, Billy, who’s about to age out of the foster system, tries to keep a mature front to mask his fear of rejection and abandonment stemming from a childhood bouncing from foster home to foster home after being left by his mother at an amusement park. When he transforms into Shazam!, he’s constantly cracking jokes and making funny faces. It’s incredibly distracting and interferes with the viewing experience.
Also at fault is the typically good Meagan Good, who plays the adult version of Darla Dudley (Faithe Herman). Good’s acting feels like theatrical acting and behaves too much like a little girl, which worked in the 2019 film, but not in Fury of the Gods where Darla is roughly 13. It feels like neither Sandberg nor the actors have any experience with how kids actually are, which is incredibly disappointing for a movie supposedly aimed at a younger audience. In fact, the most shocking moment in the film’s 130 minutes is when Darla yells, “taste the rainbow, motherfuckers!” atop a unicorn that gores through their enemies in gruesome, strictly PG-13 fashion. Just like its actors and director, Fury of the Gods can’t seem to figure out whether its for kids or adults.
It’s arguably the natural caveat of having kids magically transform into adults, but Shazam! did it better in 2019. So did Freaky Friday and Big. Speaking of kids and adults, Rachel Zegler plays Anthea, the youngest among Atlas’ children, who’s tasked with infiltrating a high school despite being thousands of years old. It’s like a less creepy but still totally weird version of sparkly vampire Edward Cullen chilling out in high school to stalk Bella Swan, Bella in this case being Freddy Freeman (Zach Dylan Grazer). She’s smitten by Freddy, who maintains his sense of humor as he’s being trashed by school bullies. It’s actually kind of cute, except that it all happens too fast and then you realize Anthea is thousands of years old and Freddy is barely 17. But she magically doesn’t look a day over 18, so it’s probably all good.
It’s a shame because there’s a solid emotional core to the story, which basically revolves around Billy trying desperately to keep his family together knowing that his foster parents won’t be able to afford to house him when he ages out of the foster system. Mary Bromfield (Grace Fulton) has a day job to help earn her keep in the house, which sort of limits all her superheroism. Naturally, Fulton is the least jarring member of the Shazamily as she plays both versions of Mary. Meanwhile, Freddy has discovered girls and uses his superhero form (Adam Brody) to flirt with the ladies just as Pedro (Jovan Armand / D.J. Cotrona) decides to tell his family that he likes boys. Eugene Choi (Ian Chen / Ross Butler) has been performing the nerdy task of chronicling all the doors in the Rock of Eternity.
Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu as Atlas’ children elevate the film’s thespic pedigree, balancing out everyone else hamming it up like they were in a school play. Levi is the biggest offender as he goofs it up like he was twelve, leaving Angel to do the dramatic heavy lifting for the most emotional, albeit cheesiest, part of the film, a dialogue between Billy and his foster mom Rosa (Marta Milans). It’s a reasonably solid story bogged down by a lot of moving parts that simply don’t quite work and would probably have been better served with episodic stories told as a television mini-series.
Fury of the Gods actually feels like a metaphor for the entire DCEU: neither here nor there with occasionally entertaining parts but ultimately non-essential viewing when considering the larger narrative. This second, possibly last, chapter of the Shazam family’s story certainly has some fun moments but is far too burdened with the swirling uncertainty of a studio that hasn’t decided where to take the franchise. Unfortunately, in an age where audiences have been unfairly brainwashed to expect shared universe narratives, Warner Bros. Discovery has dropped the ball too often and disappointed fans too many times (remember the post-credit scenes from Green Lantern, Justice League, and most recently, Black Adam?) for Fury of the Gods to be worth any emotional investment whatsoever.
