Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

All too often, sequels fall into two categories – retread the boards of the first film, playing all the hits; or take a darker bent, reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back. Unfortunately and perhaps surprisingly, Shazam! Fury of the Gods is neither. It is a two-hour coda to the first film’s third act, overly expository and largely tepid, far from an entertaining flop but somewhere just shy of memorable.
 
Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and his superheroic alter ego (Zachary Levi) are trying to keep their family together in a city that doesn’t quite love them. Dubbed “The Philadelphia Fiascoes,” this super-gang keeps saving the day, but Mary (Grace Caroline Currey) wants to go to college, while Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) longs to strike out on his own. Meanwhile, the Daughters of Atlas (Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, and Rachel Zegler) are desperate to recover their father’s strength in order to conquer the world.
 
From the earliest trailers, I had a sense that something was wrong. Why wasn’t I excited about this movie? I had liked the first Shazam film well enough, and its third act twist – that the entire family had been granted magical powers – was the sort of thing that most franchises would have held in reserve for a second or third installment. Taking off those restraints, then, should have made for a very exciting and fresh sequel, covering ground that even the comics haven’t had much time to tread. (Though Mary and Freddy had been super since their debut, the rest of Billy’s foster siblings didn’t get their powers until 2011.)
 
Unfortunately, straying from the comics seems to be the film’s biggest downfall. The erstwhile Captain Marvel (don’t ask – it’s a whole thing) is one of the oldest superheroes in comics, debuting in 1940, and he has a fairly deep bench of supervillains and stories worth adapting.¹ Yet the filmmakers here have invented a trio of antagonists out of whole cloth and forgotten to give them personalities along the way. Hespera (Mirren), Kalypso (Liu), and Anthea (Zegler) have a set of powers that allows them to do whatever the plot needs of them, taking only a negligible amount of inspiration from the Greek myths that named them – never mind that Shazam is only half Greek myth (with two Roman gods and a Judaic monarch in the mix, as well). Consequently, Fury of the Gods never gels into a Shazam story, even over and against the fact that the protagonist, shockingly, still doesn’t know what to call himself.
 
This Shazam hangs a lantern on itself by name-checking the Fast and the Furious franchise, invoking a film series that clenches its jaw every time it insists that it’s actually a story about “family.” There are two families pitted against each other in Fury of the Gods, though the comparison isn’t belabored as much as one might have expected. (I kept waiting, for example, to learn that the Daughters of Atlas, of varying ages and ethnicities, were actually adopted, something that might have added weight to their conflict with Billy and his foster family.) Yet while that particular horse isn’t beaten, much of the film is overloaded with exposition, saddling charismatic performers with dialogue that forces them to explain MacGuffin after MacGuffin. Character conflicts are spoken, never quite depicted, and much of the movie quite literally reads books of mythology at us, perhaps in the hopes that we’ll fall asleep before remembering that the myths aren’t actually like that. By the time the dragons and minotaurs show up, it felt like a much longer film than it actually was.
 
There is a hint of something in the film that seems to work. Director David F. Sandberg is quite good at sleight of hand, balancing elements in the first act without tipping his hand that they’ll manifest in the finale. A pocketful of Skittles, for example, seems like a throwaway gag but ends up being of the utmost importance in a way that feels perfectly organic for these characters. Yet in other moments, the film fumbles its own ball, as when we learn that Eugene has been meticulously cataloguing the magical doors that pervade the family’s lair, the Rock of Eternity. Naturally, there comes a moment when the characters must choose the right door, but rather than rely on Eugene’s magic maps, the film biffs the landing by having Billy (and I could not make this up) follow the lingering scent of a porta-potty.
 
I hadn’t realized it at the time – I was actually trying not to fall asleep – but that sequence ends up being a microcosm for all of Fury of the Gods. So many of the pieces are in place that the film should be working, but all too often the audience is promised that something great is just behind Door Number Three. Yet the film ends up, time and again, choosing the easy, lame, and somewhat stinky path, hoping the audience is in on the joke. A film with the pedigree of this Shazam deserves better – Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu, at least, deserved better; they are clearly relishing the opportunity to chew the scenery and bathe in a river of ham, but too many of their scenes are shot as though their contracts were just about to lapse.
 
Maybe I’m becoming a curmudgeon. Maybe I’ve seen too many superhero movies in the last fifteen years for the genre to hold much allure for me any longer. Maybe I’ve seen all the tricks in the bag – Fury of the Gods never does anything catastrophically wrong, but nor does it have any surprises in store. Then again, I usually ask myself whether the children in my audience enjoyed it. They certainly did in Black Adam, leading me to think that Black Adam might have been worth it after all. But the few kids that accompanied my screening of Fury of the Gods seemed somewhat lackadaisical; they reacted only to the souped-up remix of an Elvis Presley song that played out over the credits. 
 
And this is all to say nothing of the corporate horsetrading that is on naked display in this Fury. The DC Extended Universe, born in 2013 with Man of Steel, seems to be whimpering its way to an early and untended grave; even after James Gunn’s much-heralded announcement of the advent of his DC Universe (subtitled “Gods and Monsters”), we’re being regaled with four films set in a dead franchise. Warner Brothers cancelled Batgirl and seems not to know what to do with The Flash or the next Aquaman sequel, while all of us (Warners included) seem to keep forgetting that Blue Beetle is still going to be released. Fury of the Gods contains cameos from abandoned franchises, teases for sequels that probably won’t come to pass, and a post-credits scene that may or may not know how ironically it’s satirizing the very notion of a post-credits scene. Meanwhile, Shazam’s most famous antagonist can’t be bothered to appear, either from Dwayne Johnson’s intervention or studio resentment of the same.
 
All the while, one hears Sandberg and the rest of the crew begging and pleading for another shot at the Shazam family. Next time, they promise, they’ll get it right; but with a new creative driver who seems keen on cutting everything that didn’t originate in or advance his own sub-franchise, I’m skeptical about the prospect of a Gunn-era Shazam. We’ll need a new magic word, or at least a superhero whose nose isn’t clogged with sewage.
 

Shazam! Fury of the Gods is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence, and language.” Directed by David F. Sandberg. Written by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Caroline Currey, Rachel Zegler, Lucy Liu, Djimon Hounsou, and Helen Mirren.

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1 Arguably his most iconic storyline, “The Monster Society of Evil,” was ostensibly being held in reserve for a third film that may never come to pass. One is reminded all too belatedly of the advice of comics writer Tom Taylor, who is said to have advised new writers, “Use your best ideas now.”^↩

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003)

In mining for films to review, I've been digging back into movies that I love but haven't seen in a while. Quentin Tarantino's fourth film, the first volume of his Kill Bill revenge epic, fell squarely in that category, so I felt it needed to be viewed again.

I'm almost sorry I did that. KB1 is not as good as I remember it being. Though it's still rip-roaring good fun, it's not exactly high cinema. Is there anything wrong with that? Not really... but this is one of those postmodernist moments where the simulation - my memory of the film - is better than the actual thing.

What I loved about the movie - and still do - is its unique structure, which divides the story into ten nonchronological chapters over two movies. The basic throughline of the movie is the story of The Bride's quest for revenge against her assassin cohorts who tried to kill her when she left their organization. The Bride (Uma Thurman) has five names on her list, and in the first volume she gets to two of them - O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox).

It's tricky to review Vol. 1 without acknowledging Vol. 2, so at least some comparisons are necessary. Vol. 1 is a lot more action-packed and a lot more colorful than its successor, but I'm not sure that makes it a great movie. It's a lot of fun, for sure; the action scenes, incredibly violent though they are, are rousing at a visceral level, instilling "Ew" and "Ah" at all the right moments, even on subsequent viewings. The direction, despite being lifted as "homages" to other works, is visually stimulating, with angles conveying more at times than the performances.

Of course, this being a Tarantino movie, we expect two things: a powerhouse of a soundtrack and snarky dialogue that predates Diablo Cody by more than a decade. On the first count, Vol. 1 delivers in a big way; the songs Tarantino chooses fit perfectly with the scenes on screen, but at times it seems like too much of a good thing, at times overtly showy. Then again, this is the film that introduced "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" and "Woo Hoo" to American listeners, so it's certainly not all bad.

As for the dialogue, I used to love its snappiness. Now I look at Vol. 1 and realize just how uneven it is. The Bride (whose name is cleverly never mentioned in the first film, although you can see it if you freeze-frame her plane ticket) alternates between intellectualism and street speak, sometimes distractingly so within the same scene. Though the writing is clever and well-organized, it's this dialectic disparity (which fortunately seems rectified in the second installment) that hurts the overall authorial reputation Tarantino earned from the likes of Pulp Fiction.

I suppose I would like Vol. 1 more if it were coupled with Vol. 2 in one movie-going experience; that would probably launch into great movie status, since a four-hour movie wouldn't be as easily dwarfed by these shortcomings. The thing is, I don't believe Tarantino set out to make an enduring classic of cinema. I believe he wanted to make his own movie that captured all the fun and excitement of the campy flicks he grew up with. And in that endeavor, he succeded. "A roaring rampage of revenge," the film describes itself. Oh, it roars, and it rampages, and it leaves the audience slightly breathless.

Perfect it isn't, but bloody satisfying? You betcha, kiddo.