Summary
The return of the major franchise that’s all about family. Not that one, the other one. The DCU continues to find its funnybone with the long-awaited return of these characters.
It’s been four years since the joyful Shazam hit cinemas, and in many ways it feels as though the world has moved on since then. With the DC Extended Universe all but abandoned by its parent company, David F. Sandberg’s sequel is very much the abandoned child of a neglected franchise. Hell, even some of the kids are old enough to play adult versions of themselves now.
So, SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS wastes little time in establishing its basic setup. Old world gods Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) have returned to claim the magical staff that gave Billy (Zachary Levi/Asher Angel) and his adoptive family their powers in the first film. They don’t want to stop there, of course: some of these gods want to reclaim the world.
It couldn’t come at a worse time. Billy is feeling some serious imposter syndrome. Rejected by his city, and holding on too tight to a family he’s afraid of losing, even visions of the Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) are barely enough to hold it all together.
As the James Gunn-led DC Universe gets ready to relaunch the hero brand onto the world, SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS feels like an attempt to throw a little bit of everything against the wall and see what sticks. In fact, it quite literally covers the walls of sets with posters and iconography from other studio-owned franchises. After all, this is a sequel that comes saddled with not one but six (or more) heroes and very little time to explore them.
Even the set-ups feel like a mishmash of borrowed ideas from other films. The first set-piece action sequence is a collapsing bridge, the kind we’ve seen fall and down in [checks notes] literally every action film ever. There’s a pinch of Doctor Strange in Anthea’s (Rachel Zegler) powers. There’s a dragon. Terraforming. At one point, the film seems to empty out the archives of Ray Harryhausen’s workshop onto the streets of Philadelphia. Skittles joins E.T.’s Reece’s Pieces in the realm of promotional considerations as plot device. Hell, the back half of the film seems to be borrowed from Under the Dome (or The Simpsons Movie if you prefer).
You know what else it is? Fun. It’s nowhere near as unabashedly joyful as the first outing, and you can see the conscious machinations pedalling furiously behind every laden scene. Yet even if the setups are familiar, the goofy charm of these characters continues to shine through. Riffing on the (name-dropped) Fast and the Furious notion of family, you can’t help but root for these little guys in the face of adversity.
Zegler makes a terrific new addition to the cast, arriving off the back of several critically acclaimed roles. You’ll see all of her character turns coming, but she wears them well. Mirren and Liu feel like they’ve walked straight out of a Power Rangers tribute and into the DCU, but Mirren in particular lends the film some weight. Plus, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Liu ride a CG dragon over the City of Brotherly Love. On the downside, these new additions to an already stacked cast means that the some of the more interesting arcs (such as D. J. Cotrona’s) are given perfunctory resolution.
The film’s technical elements are solid too. While contemporaries have run into a mess of pre-visualised muddiness, SHAZAM’s final major sequence is a reliably old-school city smasher. Filling Philly with overgrown plants and creatures, it briefly gives each of those characters something to do – even if it’s only for 20 minutes or so. The soundtrack, swinging from Bonnie Tyler to remixes of Elvis Presley, is perhaps emblematic of the ‘let’s see what works’ storytelling.
While SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS ultimately lands as a mostly self-contained entity, and can be enjoyed whether you’ve seen any previous entries or not. Yet it wouldn’t be a modern event film without pointing other pathways to the future. At the time of writing, we couldn’t possibly comment on how and where they are going. Still, if they maintain the basic DNA of this series, that can’t be a bad thing.
2023 | USA | DIRECTOR: David F. Sandberg | WRITERS: Henry Gayden, Chris Morgan | CAST: Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Rachel Zegler, Adam Brody, Ross Butler, Meagan Good, Lucy Liu, Djimon Hounsou, Helen Mirren | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures (AUS), Warner Bros. (US)| RUNNING TIME: 130 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 16 March 2023 (AUS), 17 March 2023 (USA)
