Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Shazam! Wrath of the Gods is a thoroughly conventional comic book movie that won't impress anyone, but it won't offend them either. At least this time we have bad guys with human faces and not some computer-generated creature without a hint of facial expressions or a touch of charisma. In terms of the recently failed DC universe, it's one of the better (read "at least average") films, but I'm missing the main target audience by at least 15 years or so. (17/03/2023)

The point of the first episode “my family will help me when I'm up to my ears in shit”, in the second episode becomes “if my family needs help, I'll try to help them myself and die”. Shazam is a recreation with a big drawback and that is the unlikeable Levi as the main hero and the even less likeable main sidekick. Otherwise, it's a pretty harmless flick about three sisters who want their due and one goes crazy and wants to destroy the world with a wooden dragon. There are lot of absurd things, including a pointless cameo; it’s good to fall asleep. I finished watching it on a third screening. (28/04/2023)

I liked the first film better, either because it was the first, or because it didn’t pretend to be anything it wasn’t. The Wrath of the Gods may still be basically the same boyish twaddle with its charming heroes and their equally disarming alter egos, but it could have avoided trying to be something more, because it doesn't really fit, and the good and well-delivered jokes and the flood of mythological creatures somewhat grind. Still, I'm sad that there probably won't be a third installment, and I attribute Shazam's failure more to the audience's oversaturation than to its alleged shortcomings. (22/03/2023)

The first Shazam! was a pretty nice and unpretentious flick, but Fury of the Gods, unfortunately, flirts with moments of awkwardness for a noticeable part of its running time, offering a predictable and overly instructive story about the importance of family (and no, it's not another Fast and Furious). It also has reprehensibly overlong running time and, at times, rather poor CGI. Fury of the Gods wants to be fun and brisk, but it fails badly. In this case, I'm not so sorry that I didn't catch the film in the cinema and watched it in the end thanks to Netflix. (05/06/2024)

A classic case of a movie where the studio thinks it’s a good idea to shell out over $100 million for a second installment, but nobody really cares. And, naturally, it’s a well-deserved flop that will give Warner's accountants a severe headache. Granted, the second Shazam is much better and, above all, funnier than the utterly lame first movie. It has more one-liners, jokes, innuendos, and Rachel Zegler’s cute looks, but in the end, it's still an ugly B-movie that takes the superhero genre back to the prehistoric era. Some of the visual effects are truly awful and I can’t figure out where all that money went. Unfortunately, they’re not nearly as awful as Lucy Liu's acting "performance", which was literally screaming for a Golden Raspberry Award nomination. All the scenes with Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren are so cringe-worthy that it's a real accomplishment to make it to the end of the movie without skipping their scenes. (14/05/2023)