Shazam! Fury of the Gods — Review Thread

They could've just re-titled this Comic Book Movie: The Movie, and it would've felt appropriate.  Everything about this movie just feels like it's coasting on autopilot.  The villains are villains just cause, the conflict is obligatory, Zachary Levi is honestly kind of obnoxious and dumb as Shazam -- not to mention the disparity between his performance and Asher Angel's feeling magnified this time around (for, like, the five total minutes of screentime that Asher Angel has) -- the action sequences are bland and loud, etc.  Whatever sense of heart that the first movie had is sacrificed here for bland superhero storytelling and noisy setpieces plus humor that largely lands with a thud, outside of a few good moments.  And just like the first one, it's just too long.  I definitely won't miss these movies after the DC reboot.

People talk about certain superhero movies bombing this year, but in the realm of financial failure few hold a candle to this sequel to Shazam!, which only made $57 million dollars domestically… that’s $16 million less than Morbius. And this doesn’t seem to have been a surprise to the studio either, they happily poured a hundred million dollars into making this thing and then dumped it with what seems to have been a contractual minimum of advertising. Partly that has to do with timing. The first movie only came out four years ago, which isn’t that long ago especially when you consider that there were almost certainly COVID delays, but it was long ago enough that the memory of that first movie faded quite a bit from the collective imagination. It just isn’t a good enough movie to keep people waiting for a follow-up. And this follow-up kind of has the same problem, it’s not really a “bad” movie exactly but it is painfully mediocre. That’s something the first movie could kind of get away with because there was still novelty to its concept and its status as an origin story did more to bring whatever originality there was to be found in the whole “kid who turns into an adult superhero” concept, but in a sequel that matters a lot less and you’re left with a very by-the-numbers superhero concept. When this is in its CGI superhero fights villains mode it offers basically nothing we haven’t seen before and are just plain sick of. I suspect this is a movie that would have been a lot more welcomed critically and commercially if it came out in a world where there were only one or two superhero movies a year but we haven’t lived in that world for a long time and people just do not have time for a middling and “average” superhero flick anymore. This just isn’t good enough to compete and I really just don’t have it in me to grade these things generously anymore.