Shazam! Fury of the Gods

An often intolerable sequel, Shazam! Fury of the Gods follows Zachary Levi’s title character as he and his fellow heroes attempt to prevent Lucy Liu’s Kalypso and Helen Mirren’s Hespera from destroying the world. Filmmaker David F. Sandberg, working from Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan’s screenplay, kicks Shazam! Fury of the Gods off with an underwhelming, unappealing opening stretch that immediately establishes a vibe of complete and total tedium, as the picture, which runs an often endless 130 minutes, has been suffused with a slick, generic sensibility that’s compounded by a lack of engaging elements – with, for example, the proliferation of one-dimensional characters only perpetuating the movie’s disposable and hopelessly tiresome feel. (This is especially disappointing given just how appealing the narrative’s heroes were in the comparatively masterful original film.) And although Sandberg has peppered the proceedings with a very small handful of entertaining attributes (eg Kalypso forces a hypnotized teacher to walk off a rooftop), Shazam! Fury of the Gods‘ pervasively interminable atmosphere, coupled with a dimly-lit, spinning-its-wheels midsection, paves the way for a third act that couldn’t possibly be less exciting or satisfying – with the end result one of the worst comic-book adaptations to hit theaters in a good long while.

* out of ****