Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shazam 2! Fury of the Gods’ on Max, More Cluttered DC Superhero Slop

This week on Deep Sigh Theatre is Shazam! Fury of the Gods (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), the new DC Extended Universe movie and a sequel to 2019’s perfectly enjoyable, $368 million-grossing box office hit Shazam! Thanks to the chaos that has become characteristic of the DCEU, Fury was bumped up and down the release schedule until it finally landed in theaters in March, 2023 – and was met with near-indifference and tepid ticket sales. To paraphrase that one guy, wha happened? Are we sick of DC junk like Black Adam and Wonder Woman 1984? Are we finally getting superheroed out? Or is Fury of the Gods just a crummy movie? Maybe all of the above.

SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A PEACEFUL MUSEUM: Families are having fun looking at old artifacts and crap when two ladies garbed in gold crowns and armor walk in and the camera pivots to reveal that, whoa nelly, they are Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren! Or, more specifically, these veteran actresses are playing Kalypso and Hespera, respectively, both daughters of Atlas, the guy who held the whole world on his shoulders. They want the Staff of the Gods so they may… well, I don’t know what they want, exactly. They’re just evil, I guess, and they’re following the compulsions of your typical superhero-movie villains, making everyone chase them around while they use a MacGuffin to wreak miscellaneous havoc throughout Philadelphia. First order of business: Turn all the museum patrons into statues. Second order of business: Never stop spewing utterly meaningless exposition.

Meanwhile, two years have passed since the end of Shazam! Our protagonist, a superhero who we’ll just call Shazam (Zachary Levi), shares his many insecurities with his doctor. There’s a big reason for said insecurities – he’s still a kid named Billy Batson (Asher Angel) who can shout the word “Shazam” and get strictly by lightning and be transformed into a 42-year-old guy in cape and tights who can fly and shoot lightning zaps from his hands, yet still retain the psychological profile of a young man with an underdeveloped teenage brain. Same goes for Billy’s five foster siblings, who, at the end of the first movie, also acquired the same Shazam powers. When they’re not going to school and suffering the tortures of adolescence, their superhero adult selves hang out in a cave lair and fly around the city attempting heroic deeds. Note the word choice, because “attempting” is different than “achieving,” and their part-bungling, part-misunderstood deeds have resulted in newspaper headlines – hey, remember newspapers? – dubbing them the Philadelphia Fiascos. 

Now, this being a movie that turtle-crawls past the two-hour mark, a lot goes on here, but very little of it is consequential. You’ve already deduced that the “Shazamily” is gonna have to do something about Kalypso and Hespera, and do something they most certainly do, because if they didn’t, the movie wouldn’t deliver the pedestrian action sequences that we’re theoretically supposed to enjoy. While Billy/Shazam farts around – notably, having a dream in which he’s on a date with Wonder Woman, except her head is that of the Wizard (Djimon Hounsou), returning from the first movie to deliver additional reams of utterly meaningless exposition – a subplot with his foster brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) happens in which he uses his superpowered alter-ego (Adam Brody) to help endear him to the new girl in school, Anne (Rachel Zegler of West Side Story fame), who SURELY has nothing to do with the greater plot involving the mean ladies and their plan to cover Philadelphia with a dome and unleash their dragon. If you have a question at this point, e.g., What the hell is all this nonsense, that’s completely understandable. And the answer is, it’s a heaping crock of bullshit. But what did you expect? The next Tokyo Story or something?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I dunno man, this thing has more of a half-assed My Super Ex-Girlfriend vibe than anything else, and it’s almost as forgettable. And it’s so lightweight, it makes Ant-Man look like Oscar bait.

Performance Worth Watching: Levi stands slightly above the anonymousness of these performances thanks to the occasional charmingly goofy line reading. 

Memorable Dialogue: A prime example of the base comedy level on which this movie functions:

Darla (Faithe Herman): “Taste the rainbow, motherfu-”

A unicorn: BLEEEEAATTTTTTTT

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: The residents of Philadelphia in this movie don’t seem to care too much that their town is taken over by evil goddesses bent on unleashing monsters of myth and legend to destroy things, so why should we? There’s a scene in Fury of the Gods where locals go about their day as if the entire city isn’t encased in an impenetrable bubble, and their local hero, Shazam, parks at a picnic table to eat a steak sandwich and gaze into his navel. In other words, hey, no rush to fix this predicament, might as well linger over lunch. What exactly is at stake here? The villains’ motive is at best incoherent, and possibly nonexistent, and the movie’s overall tone is so flippant, our emotional investment in the drama is rendered nil. It’s vague stakes/low stakes/no stakes jive malarkey.

Which is too bad, because the core idea – kids trying to overcome their own immaturity-derived incompetence to save the town – has heaps of comedy potential. But the film is cluttered and unfocused like the design aesthetic of a teenager’s bedroom: Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a dragon? Now let’s add minotaurs and cyclopses! Better yet, let’s throw in some unicorns, and not just the usual unicorns, but SCARY unicorns! SCARY unicorns tamed by a specific name-brand ultra-sugary candy whose marketing catchphrase is wedged into the dialogue more than once – in a scene that derails the big final action-packed conglomeration of noise and movement to a halt! Did I mention that the “Shazamily” also prefers to drink a specific name-brand ultra-sugary sports beverage? Well, the movie would LOVE it if I mentioned the brand name, no doubt!

I digress. Where was I? Right: this movie is disposable junk. The Shazam character’s internal struggles consist of about 2.4 running jokes, and don’t comprise much of an arc – if there is one, it’s his desire to go steady with Wonder Woman, which, hey, take a number bro – leaving Levi to be shoved aside so the dozen or so other characters can exist in scenes with little dramatic purpose and little to offer comedically. Grazer’s character is an irritating chatterbox; Zegler’s character feels tacked on at the last minute; the squadron of actors comprising Shazam’s fellow heroes functions as background noise instead of as a means to expand upon the formula of the first Shazam! movie. And then there’s the Shakespearean gravitas of Helen Mirren, and the considerable thespian skills of Djimon Hounsou, and even the notable command presence of Lucy Liu – their casting seems to suggest that Shazam! Fury of the Gods exists to make highly talented Hollywood veterans look absolutely ridiculous. Hell, I felt absolutely ridiculous just watching the damn thing.   

Our Call: BLEEEAATTTTTTT. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.