Minor spoilers ahead.
What happened to this movie? The first "Shazam!" was one of the more memorable DCEU superhero outings, because it was one of the few that was aimed squarely at kids, and offered a lot of humor, heart, and poignancy to go with its CGI-heavy punch-em-ups. Billy Batson, played by Asher Angel, had some genuinely interesting emotional territory to explore as a Philadelphia foster kid struggling to accept the love of a new family. Now it's four years later, though apparently only two have passed in universe, and the "Shazam!" crew is ready for a new outing. And it's a mess.
Clearly there was a lot going on behind the scenes of "Shazam! Fury of the Gods." The movie actually has a lot of good things in it - a lot of the humor works, some of the ideas are fun, and foster parents Rosa and Victor (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews) are the secret MVPs of these films. It's good to see more of the adult versions of the kid superheroes, with Adam Brody and Meagan Good making an especially good impression. However, the whole movie is built around two characters, and really just two actors - the adult Billy played by Zachary Levi, and Billy's best friend Freddy, played by Dylan Jack Grazer. These two get the lion's share of the screen time in this movie, with very mixed results.
Levi, once again, is not on the same wavelength as Asher Angel at all. Billy is supposed to be seventeen, and Levi is playing him like a much younger, brattier kid in the body of an adult. And having so much more screen time makes him come across as a far more obnoxious, blustering dope. Asher has maybe five brief scenes and barely gets to do anything. Instead, the cute teenage romance subplot goes to Freddy, who falls for the new girl at school, Anne (Rachel Zegler). Grazer and Brody are more in sync, and pull off the body switching more seamlessly than Angel and Levi, so it makes sense why they get featured more this time out. Grazer is clearly the best actor among the kids, and the movie ends up heaping a lot on his shoulders. However, this makes the story feel so unbalanced, that I suspected they were setting up Freddy to take over the franchise. Wishful thinking, maybe.
Remember the after-credits sequence of the first "Shazam" setting up a new bug villain? Well, he's in the after-credits sequence of this movie too, setting up an appearance in another sequel that probably will never happen. The main villains here are a couple of Greek goddesses, the daughters of Atlas, who want the Shazam powers. Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) steal the magic staff and menace the wizard (Djimon Honsou) into giving them information about Shazam. How they got Helen Mirren to agree to be in this movie is a mystery, as she's utterly wasted. Ditto Lucy Liu, but that's sadly nothing new.
A lot of these creative decisions, including several cameos, were reportedly due to Dwayne Johnson throwing his weight around behind the scenes. His character, Black Adam, was supposed to be a "Shazam!" villain, but he wanted nothing to do with the "Shazam!" movies for reasons that are a mystery. Of course, this doesn't explain why there wasn't enough time with the kids as kids, Billy's character arc was very minimal, or why there's a shameless deus ex machina ending (literally!) that made me groan. I still think that Shazam is fun as a concept and character, but being part of the DCEU has been detrimental, and this is an installment that really didn't need to exist.
Still, there are some good action scenes and some good laughs to be found amidst the wreckage of an over-compromised script. This often feels more kid-friendly than the previous Shazam movie, though there are still a few weirdly dark moments. "Shazam! Fury of the Gods" should be fine for your basic superhero needs, but it's not remotely as good as the first, and it's a shame to see so much talent and so much potential go to waste. This is one of the last proper DCEU movies before James Gunn takes over, and it's the fitting equivalent of a crash landing.
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