Directed by David F. Sandberg — Screenplay by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods takes place four years after the events of the first film. Nowadays, Billy Batson (played by Asher Angel and Zachary Levi) and his Shazam Family of foster siblings are trying to balance being superheroes and being kids and teenagers at the same time. It’s not exactly going to plan as they are dubbed the ‘Philadelphia Fiascos’ by local media. Having grown older, the foster siblings are growing apart, and Billy is especially struggling with it, and right at this moment in time a trio of super-powered individuals appear. These are the daughters of the Titan Atlas — Hespera (played by Helen Mirren), Kalypso (played by Lucy Liu), and Anthea (played by Rachel Zegler) — they want revenge on the Wizard (played by Djimon Hounsou) and plan to remove the Shazam Family’s powers.
Stick with me here. A part of me feels like I should apologize to my fellow Scandinavian, filmmaker David F. Sandberg. I’ve enjoyed following the Swede and YouTuber’s rise to fame, as his short films starring his partner Lotta Losten ultimately got him a job as a feature filmmaker adapting his most famous short, Lights Out. After the feature film version of Lights Out, which I enjoyed, he moved on to Annabelle: Creation, which I enjoyed, and then he got a big budget breakthrough with Shazam!, which I — you guessed it! — also really enjoyed (it’s honestly one of my favorite films in the so-called DCEU).
So, why am I apologizing? Well, in spite of all of this, I didn’t rush to theaters to see his fourth feature — Shazam! Fury of the Gods — when it was released earlier this year. In my defense, I was, at that moment in time, overwhelmed by a change in work environment, a longer daily commute than normal, and things like that. I just didn’t find time for it. Meanwhile, Fury of the Gods became Sandberg’s first box-office bomb. While I realize that my one ticket wouldn’t have done anything in the grand scheme of things, I really don’t like being a part of a larger problem for filmmakers that I enjoy. So, yeah, I’m sorry, David F. Sandberg. With that out of the way, I can now — as I’ve now gotten the chance to see the film — share my opinion of Fury of the Gods. And again I’m sorry because I have to say that it’s easily the weakest entry in his feature filmography and a lower-tier DCEU film.
So, what gives? After all, it is the same filmmaker from the first film, and it is still a big-hearted family film with a sprinkling of the kind of horror sensibilities that Sandberg is known for. Frankly, this is a film that really suffers from sequelitis — i.e. this idea that in trying to make the sequel ‘bigger,’ the final product doesn’t hang together as well as the original film did. There are more monsters than there were in the first film, there are more villains, and the many heroes are split up in a way that makes it seem less focused. That last point is a huge reason why I think this film just isn’t as charming and immediately as lovable as the first film was. Because one of the big reasons why the first film is so fun to watch is because pairing up Zachary Levi’s sugar-high Big-inspired kid-in-a-superhero’s-body behavior with Jack Dylan Grazer — who plays Billy’s superhero-obsessed and bullied foster sibling — and his quick-witted and eager performance gave off this infectious excitement that just really worked for the film.
In Fury of the Gods, these characters are often split up (you miss seeing them bounce off each other here), and the non-superhero version of Billy Batson is barely there. This is a shame because even though Asher Angel and Zachary Levi’s performances didn’t match up in the first film, the scene involving Asher Angel’s version of the character and Billy’s biological mother was genuinely affecting. In the two or three scenes that Asher Angel gets in the sequel, I could tell that he was trying to be more upbeat so as to be closer to Levi’s performance. It’s still not a match. Perhaps we barely see Angel because they wanted to avoid that same criticism from sticking to this film as well, but it is an overcorrection as the distinct lack of normal Billy Batson makes him feel less real and relatable, and, as a result, I couldn’t get into Levi’s more dramatic work.
It also doesn’t help that Shazam has been written in a way that Levi just struggles to sell. Whenever Levi is asked to use phrases like ‘aggro’ or ‘fam,’ it comes off as unnatural and awkward. Honestly, a lot of the film’s problems come down to writing issues. The dialogue mostly consists of stilted lines for the utterly miscast antagonists and stale reference humor for the core cast. The narrative is unfocused, developments are unearned, actors are asked to constantly ‘wink to the camera’ with the way they talk (there is a blatant Skittles product placement sequence that just feels wrong), and the very ending does away with the potential impact of the third act in a way that felt insulting. On top of all of this, while there are highlights — Zachary Levi has his moments, Jack Dylan Grazer is still fun to watch, and both Meagan Good and Faithe Herman’s performances are perfectly-tuned as ‘Darla’ — and Sandberg’s work is undeniably competent, everything else about this superhero film is just generic and bland, which is also in part due to the often weightlessness of the destruction and the action.
Look, David F. Sandberg is a solid filmmaker, and he has proven that he can make great and charming family entertainment with the excellent first Shazam-film. But Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a serious step down in quality. It’s a shoddily-written family-oriented superhero flick that fails to recapture the magic of the first film. It’s ultimately just generic, bland, unfocused, and overlong. What a shame.
5 out of 10
– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 