Shazam! Fury of the Gods (Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, DC Entertainment, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, August 3) my husband Charles and I watched Shazam! Fury of the Gods, sequel to the 2019 film Shazam! which we’d watched together last May and which had utterly delighted me. What I liked best about it was that it was an old-fashioned fun comic-book superhero movie rather than one of those dreary modern-day offtakes that attempts to use it for some serious meditations on the miseries of the human condition. I’d heard from my friend Jeff Breeze of Bears San Diego, my go-to guy for minutiae about comic-book superhero movies, that Shazam! Fury of the Gods was considered a major disappointment both artistically and commercially, mainly because it went so far over budget that there was virtually no way it could have recouped its costs and turned a profit (it cost $125 million to make and grossed $133 million, but the rule of thumb in the movie industry is that with advertising and distribution costs added in, a film has to make twice its production budget to be profitable), but I didn’t find it disappointing at all. It faithfully carried over everything I’d liked about the first Shazam!, including not only the light tone of the overall movie but the real pathos between the foster parents (Victor Vasquez and Marta Milans) of Our Heroes and the teenagers entrusted to their care, including Billy Batson (Asher Angel), Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), Eugene Choi (Ian Chen), Pedro Peña (Jovan Armond), Mary Bromfield (Grace Caroline Currey) and Darla Dudley (Faith Herman). The gimmick behind both Shazam! movies is that the power of the ancient Greek gods transforms these teenage characters into adult superheroes – all but Mary are played by different actors in their hero guises: Zachary Levi as Billy, Adam Brody as Freddy, Ross Butler as Eugene, D. J. Cotrona as Pedro and Meagan Good as Darla.

The film opens in a Greek history museum in Athens, where the main exhibit is the two halves of the staff of power once wielded by the Titan Atlas, then passed on to The Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) once the gods defeated the titans way back when, and bestowed by him onto Billy in the first film. Billy used it to transform his foster siblings into superheroes to vanquish Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong) in the first film, but two women in ancient Greek armor enter the museum and use their own super-powers to steal the two halves of the staff, then force The Wizard to fuse them back together so they can take over the earth and its people. The two women are Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), and they make up two-thirds of the “Daughters of Atlas,” so called not only because they are his true biological daughters but also because they’re the heirs to his powers. There are actually three Daughters of Atlas, and the third one, Anthea (Rachel Zegler), disguises herself as an Earth high-school student to befriend and hopefully seduce Freddy Freeman – though she ends up falling genuinely in love with him and her character is torn between loyalty to her sisters and their plot and her growing feelings for Freddy. (In the usual morally black-and-white world of superhero fiction, a character torn between moral dilemmas is itself a welcome novelty.) In fact, the Daughters of Atlas are split between each other in terms of just what they should do with the power of the staff once they’ve put it back together: Hespera wants to restore the original realm of the Titans and leave both the gods and the earth people alone; Kalypso wants to use their powers to obliterate the earth people and everything about them and their culture; and Anthea wants … well, it’s not clear moment by moment what she wants, but she agrees to steal the golden apple that’s the seed of the tree of life. Only the tree can grow healthily just when it’s planted in the Titans’ original garden; if it’s planted anywhere else it will let loose an army of monsters that will annihilate and destroy the world where it’s been grown.

Kalypso, who is so bitter at the Earth people for having destroyed the original Titans, wants this to happen, so she plants the apple in the middle of Philadelphia’s baseball stadium, Citizens’ Bank Park, with the aid of a giant wooden dragon called Ladon she’s conjured up from the realm of the gods (or something). All the foster kids except Billy end up deprived of their superpowers – though they get them back at the end of the movie – and the Evil Sisters surround Philadelphia with an invisible force-field dome that keeps anyone from going either in or out. Ultimately Billy sacrifices his own life to blow up the evil tree that’s hatched all the monsters, and both the monsters themselves and the unicorns that have come to life and been befriended by Our Heroes disintegrate once the tree has been blown up by the energy from Billy’s staff (he’s regained the staff from the Bad Girls). The film seemed to be moving towards a bittersweet ending in which Billy would have given his own life to save humanity, but – as with the bittersweet ending of the original Alien, which I read as Sigourney Weaver’s character sacrificing her own life to keep the killer aliens from reaching Earth and wreaking havoc on it – director David F. Sandberg and writers Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan (Sandberg and Gayden worked on the 2019 Shazam! as well; Morgan didn’t but was called in for a last-minute rewrite on this one) blew it by having Billy Batson literally rise from his grave in the final sequence. Despite that lapse – obviously motivated by Warner Bros.’ and DC’s desire to keep the character alive for a third installment – Shazam! Fury of the Gods was a sheer delight, a thrill ride that was also a genuinely good movie (as was the first Shazam!), entertaining and even moving while also not taking itself too seriously the way all too many comic-book superhero movies (including the most recent Batman films) have done. Oh, and did I mention the charming character of Steve, an animated pen which takes its own dictation, and periodically garbles its messages so that it writes down everything you say to it, whether you want it to or not – a problem I've had with the talk-to-text feature of my own cell phone?