Shazam - Fury of the Gods has been a bit of a divider. Its Rotten Tomatoes score perfectly emphasising this, with it at 50%. This can come down to a few reasons.

 

1) The villains. Helen Mirren tries her best with what she's given, but with not a lot of lines, screen time or anything important to do she goes around fighting the Shazam family and nothing much else. Lucy Liu has a try, but her facial expression stays the same for most of the film. Her focus also shifts for no reason. One minute she's trying to save her realm, and the next trying to destroy all humans. This adds up to a bit of a lacklustre performance. Rachel Zegler portrays Anthea well, but you feel little emotion for her character, as she seems a bit out of place in the movie. Another frustration about these villains is that they aren’t actually from the comics. The Shazam comics have been around for a long time, but the directors instead chose to take villains from Greek mythology (and then proceeded to change most of it for their own purposes). This could prove irritating to any Shazam comic lovers.

 

2) The superheroes. With 6 of them all fighting for attention, the titular character gets relegated in his own movie. And although the movie tries to solve that problem by taking away their powers, it doesn’t prove successful. The movie feels overstuffed, as it tries to juggle 3 villains and 6 superheroes, and that means the plot suffers because of it.

 

3) The plot. This movie is 2 hours and 10 minutes, which isn’t that long for a superhero movie, but still lags in places. This is mainly due to the plot that struggles to gain momentum, and then breaks any it has with corny jokes or big cgi battles.

 

4) The CGI. This movie is full of it.The dragon, powers and the endless horde hatched from the tree so the other characters have something to do. This detaches you, as you grow used to it. It doesn’t have as much impact as it had in years before, and it seems like Shazam! Is still holding on to far too much of it.

 

5) Screen time. Shazams true self gets about 5 minutes of screen time in the whole movie, and most of the superheroes also lack in character development due to the fact that they cannot hold lots of screen time because there are so many of them.

 

All of this culminated into the ending, which is CGI filled, and nearly underwhelming. Then the most impactful moment in the whole film comes along, and neary rescues it. Billy Batson’s sacrifice is heartwarming and sad, and makes the film feel a whole lot less silly. It is a serious moment, not punctuated by jokes or CGI. Then he gets resurrected. 

 

The resurrection of Billy ruins any heartfelt moments created by his sacrifice. It is made so that DC can make more sequels, and churn more money out of the franchise. It makes the whole movie pointless, as nearly everything goes back to how it was before. It undermines the whole film.

 

In the end, Shazam 2 is a fun but almost pointless movie, destined to be relegated to the forgotten superhero movies. Nothing special, but an easy watch for the family.