Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

4/10

Starring

Zachary Levi

Asher Angel

Jack Dylan Grazer

Rachel Zegler

Adam Brody

Ross Butler

Meagan Good

Lucy Liu

Djimon Hounsou

Helen Mirren

 

Directed by David F. Sandberg

 

This movie is horrible and it sucks. It reminds me more of those Disney Channel or Nickelodeon hero series and TV movies. The plot was all over the place. There seemed to be no focus on one thing. The director completely lost control of the movie, letting too many things happen at the same time.

And who did the casting for this movie?

I haven’t seen worse casting for a trio of baddies in a long time. The actress who plays Anne, Rachel Zegler, was so bad that I dreaded seeing her on screen. I even had to check if this was her first acting gig because she was that poor. Then we had Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren playing Kalypso and Hespera, and neither of them sold their roles to me.

So, we’ve got bad acting from Anne, two other characters who don’t fit their roles, a predictable (like next-level predictability) plot, disjointed events happening all over the place, and the director lazily stitching everything together at the end. With all this mess combined, it was a horrible time at the theater for me.

Weirdly enough, the problem wasn’t Zachary Levi. He was the only reason I could stand watching this movie for as long as I did without throwing in the towel and walking out.

The movie starts with the new family of Shazams struggling to work as a team. Some are getting too high on the fact that they’re heroes (looking at you, Freddy), while others are either too young to grasp responsibility or too much of a teenager to understand sacrifice. We learn that Shazam’s (Billy’s) actions at the end of the first movie had consequences, releasing the three daughters of Atlas.

The sisters get hold of the Wizard’s staff and are ready to reclaim their power by resurrecting their realm. Meanwhile, Freddy, the hardest to manage in the group, falls for a girl, which puts him in harm’s way. The sisters take his powers, and when his family of friends shows up to help, they kidnap Freddy and seal Philadelphia inside a dome.

Now, Billy and his Shazam family must come together to rescue Freddy and stop the sisters.

Given the current state of the DC Universe, I’m not sure if this movie will be part of a soft reboot or if it belongs to the old DCEU.

What I do know is that DC still has a lot of work to do when it comes to their movies. They just can’t seem to produce anything that stands alongside their MCU counterparts.