Review: 'Shazam! Fury of the Gods' short on superpowers

Released back in the pre-pandemic days of 2019, the original "Shazam!" was a breath of fresh air, a fun, vibrant spin on a superhero origin story and a movie that, through its own sense of breeziness, earned the exclamation point in its title.

"Shazam! Fury of the Gods," its shabby sequel, never takes flight. It goes for the same lighthearted tone and outsider approach to its hero and subject matter, but it runs low on whimsy and even lower on superhero magic. While it's only been four years since the original, it might as well have been 40.

Zachary Levi returns as Shazam. He's a teenage foster kid named Billy Batson who has been granted superhero powers by an ancient wizard also, er, named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou), and those superpowers — for some reason that is fuzzy from the first film — turn him into a guy in his early 40s. (When Billy is not in superhero form, he's played by Asher Angel, which sounds like the name of a dreamboat member of a boy band.)

Billy's pals at his foster home were also given superpowers in the first movie, and they now fight crime and save the day around their native Philadelphia, where their sometimes bumbling antics have earned them a local reputation as the Philadelphia Fiascos. Hey, Philly is a tough crowd. Among Billy's buffed out crime-fighting sidekicks is his best friend Freddy, played by Jack Dylan Grazer out of costume, and Adam Brody in superhero form. (Again, unclear why their superpowers age them into their 40s, outside of the fact that caped teenagers may read as unconvincing on screen.)

Billy is close to aging out of his foster home (Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans play his foster parents) and has deep abandonment issues, while Freddy is picked on at school and is crushing on the new girl ("West Side Story's" Rachel Zegler). Normal teenage stuff.

But normal teenage stuff is not what pushes Blockbuster Superhero Sequels, so we get a pair of ancient gods, played by Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu, who are seeking a magic staff, which holds all kinds of mystical powers and looks like a lantern you might find at Halloween USA. It's up to Team Shazam to stop them, if they can come together as a family first. (Co-writer Chris Morgan also authored a half-dozen "Fast and Furious" films and we get a "Fast and Furious" joke here, so the family theme is its own in-joke.)

Mirren and Liu never seem quite invested in the story, which becomes a humdrum power struggle between good and evil where the stakes are never quite clear. Mirren's Hespera creates a forcefield dome over Philadelphia, which doesn't seem to affect the daily lives of citizens, until a golden apple is used to plant a giant tree in the center of Citizens Bank Park, home to the 2022 National League champion Philadelphia Phillies, which spawns a whole lot of CGI-rendered monsters who wreak havoc on the town. (At least this happens during the Phillies' off-season, or while they're on an extended road trip — it's never clear which.)

Meanwhile, Liu's Kalypso rides a giant dragon around the city, which allows Shazam to log a Khaleesi joke. And so on: This is a movie where product placements become plot points, and Skittles briefly hijacks the story for its own sponsored content moment. Nothing is taken seriously and none of it really seems to matter, and the movie is a victim of its own sense of forced irreverence.

Which is a bummer, because the original "Shazam!" had an innocence and a sweetness at its core that made it a winning addition to the DC Comics Universe. Here, Levi struggles to find that same heart in his character or his surroundings, and his line readings, which have a slight hip-hop affect to their delivery, are off-kilter at best, off-putting at worst.

"Shazam! Fury of the Gods" is a movie in search of its place, and especially in our current moment of superhero fatigue, the meta jokes about Levi's character's feelings of imposter syndrome carry through to the whole production. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but "Shazam!" just can't hang with the big boys anymore.

agraham@detroitnews.com

@grahamorama

'Shazam! Fury of the Gods'

GRADE: C

Rated PG-13: for sequences of action and violence, and language

Running time: 130 minutes

In theaters