Shazam! Fury of the Gods

This time, Shazam and his family are up against a trio of ancient female villains with godlike powers and an angry dragon. More action and more visual effects doesn’t mean more quality. Unfortunately, Shazam! Fury of the Gods looks like a discount-bin comic book flick. The visual effects are downright bad, and the action and humour are both lame. The result is a bland superhero flick that never really gets going in a way that can truly engage. And then it's over, leaving nothing in your mind. (03/16/2023)

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. (04/28/2023)

#12 DCEU. Fury of the Gods is the third film in the Shazam! and Black Adam cycle. As such, it is worth paying attention to only because of Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot (the future duo from the planned Snow White). But Wonder Woman's involvement in this late stage of the DCEU is so unfortunate and unfunny that not even the sight of villains Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu pleased me. What a shame. (07/29/2023)

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. (03/22/2023)

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. (03/17/2023)

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. (05/14/2023)