REVIEW #268 Shazam: Fury of The Gods (2023)

Bestowed with magical powers, Billy Batson and his fellow foster kids try juggling their normal life as kids with the responsibilities of being heroes. Billy past heroics come back to haunt him as the Sisters of Atlas come seeking justice for their father.

Fury of The Gods is certainly an enjoyable superhero sequel that really leans into the traditional campness of the genre. It’s easy to forgive the cheesy, childish humour when your remember that the heroes at the centre of the film are in fact children themselves. This means certain leeway has to be given and it’s perfectly okay not to like that plot point, but you know that going in so it’s to be expected. The chemistry between all of the cast seems to carry this family dynamic and it actually illustrates a pretty realistic picture of what we would all be like if bestowed with these incredible powers at such a young age. Credit has to be given to the cast portraying the supes themselves because they play the part of children in adult bodies really well and it does contribute nicely to the humour that runs through the core of the movie.

Now the antagonists did feel rather similar to the first film, granted they had different motives but I think I would have preferred a totally different villain. Even the monster, minion like creatures were very reminiscent to those that appeared in the first instalment! So unfortunately it made the entire thing feel very unoriginal. I did enjoy the emotional exploration of Billy’s character, the first film showed him trying to escape his new family but here we actually see him hanging on too tight to them and that was a nice sub plot that helped inject the emotion into the storyline. The visual effects for the most part were okay, I particularly enjoyed the final battle sequence! Those dark tones, combined with the sharp contrast of the lightning bolts looked absolutely amazing and it made Shazam’s costume look so cool. 

Now this paragraph includes some slight spoilers so skip to the next paragraph if you want don’t want to risk it… my biggest issue with superhero films right now is that they continuously keep ruining the emotional impact of a noble sacrifice or a huge death of a central protagonist. Whether it’s the multiverse meaning a character never truly dies or whether it’s a magical revival like we see at the end of this film… characters never truly die! It makes the incredibly sad death pretty worthless and it makes audiences instantly hesitant to believe it. The result of this is we simply aren’t impacted as much by it, which is a real shame. The revival was also used as an excuse to get a Wonder Women cameo in. I know she was a running joke throughout the film, with Billy having a crush on her but I think there was a more organic way to include her and what we got didn’t actually make too much sense. Where the hell did she come from? Who contacted her? How did she travel to the god realm? So many unanswered questions just to get her in the film…

So to conclude the review, I actually thought it was an okay film! It’s not the best superhero film, it’s not the worst either but it doesn’t try to deceive us. We go into it knowing exactly what to expect in terms of humour and tone and that’s okay. It was severely let down by DC, imagine having to release the film when fans know that it will have absolutely no effect on the DC universe now that it’s being rebooted! Fans were super excited by the prospects of having a Shazam vs Black Adam in the future and now it all seems worthless. So I’m not surprised that it’s not doing to well at the box office, or even that it’s had real negative reviews… because fans probably feel super disheartened. But let’s hope that the new DCU will pick up the character in the future because he’s a real interesting one for sure. 

Overall (6.8/10)

Thanks for reading.

Callan