A sequel that may not have been heavily in demand can start off on the right foot with an influx of promising new faces. And the faces don’t need to be strictly speaking “new,” just new to the franchise. That’s why when she takes off her helmet in a memorable opening set piece of Shazam! Fury of the Gods, 77-year-old Helen Mirren can give us a nice “a-ha!” moment, even after being in the film industry for more than 50 years. Doubling the “a-ha” is Lucy Liu, 54, also unhelmeted, 30 years into her own movie career. Soon we’ll meet a fresh face both literally and metaphorically, as 21-year-old Rachel Zegler is coming off the high praise she received for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.
So what if this is more Same Old Story than West Side Story? Superhero movies don’t show signs of dying out anytime soon, and 2019’s Shazam! was a likeable enough one to be worth revisiting. Director David F. Sandberg is back, as is pretty much all the cast from the original film – even some who were thought to be dead. But is anyone really dead in superhero movies anymore?
If you though Shazam was the name of the main character, played by Zachary Levi as an adult, you’d be wrong – or it isn’t yet, anyway. Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is still technically in search of his superhero name, “Shazam!” just being something he and his fellow orphans, who all live with the same foster parents, yell when they want to transform into adults wearing tights, capes and lightning bolts on their chests. (Actually, one of them, played by Grace Caroline Currey, is the same actress as a kid and an adult, as it appears Michelle Borth was not asked back from the original.) These powers were bestowed on them in the first film by a wizard (Djimon Hounsou), who, as already spoilt, is not actually dead.
This time they’re going up against the aforementioned sisters, Hespera (Mirren) and Kalypso (Liu), both daughters of the Greek titan Atlas. They arrive on the scene in rather unnerving fashion, turning a Greek museum upside down after they rip a broken staff from its display case. With the powers granted them by this staff, they can turn the other museumgoers into murderous zombies just by whispering in their ears. Both Shazam! movies have a scene that’s just a tad too old for the aspirational eight-year-olds in the audience, and this is that one.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, Billy and his friends have been dubbed by the local media “the Philly Fiascos,” given their proclivity for accidentally destroying as much stuff as they save. Sure, no one died in the collapse of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, a great opening set piece that harkens back to DC’s original Superman from 1978, but all the news cameras see is that the bridge ended up in the Delaware River.
The characters already have quite a bit of their own journeys to deal with – one character about to age out of foster care, another in love with the new girl at school, a third trying to decide whether to come out – but all that will have to go on the back burner when the sisters and their staff come to town, seeking to rebuild their lost realm. That requires a second MacGuffin – a silver apple – to plant the seed right on top of existing Philadelphia. Before all is said and done, mythical creatures will run rampant through the streets, and that’s as fun as it sounds.
There’s a lot going on in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, a problem plaguing most superhero sequels. Fortunately, in the second Shazam!, it’s more a feature than a bug. Somehow, Sandberg and screenwriters Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan stuff the screen with characters, without anyone we really care about getting the short shrift. (We didn’t know Philly Fiascos #4 through #6 that well anyway.)
If the Philly Fiascos saved the day at that bridge, the actors save the day in Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Levi is an obvious place to start, as charming here as he was in the first film, a 42-year-old man with the mannerisms of a 17-year-old kid. Unexpectedly strong support, though, comes from Hounsou, whose role is played largely for comedy this time around. He’s the sort of put-upon veteran that Danny Glover got so much mileage from in the Lethal Weapon movies. Billy’s best friend Freddy Freeman has equally adept actors playing him at both ages, though we see a lot more of the young Jack Dylan Grazer than the adult Adam Brody, who could have used a few more scenes.
It’s the women, though, who are really the MVPs. Mirren has been a little less selective in recent years, but she still brings with her a certain imprimatur that lends credibility to a potentially fledgling sequel. Ditto Liu, to a lesser extent, and newcomer Zegler. So as not to just repeat the first paragraph of this piece, special mention should go to Currey, star of last year’s Fall, who seems ascendant at the moment. And we can’t mention the last woman to make a surprise appearance, but if you know what cinematic universe Shazam! calls home, you might be able to guess —which doesn’t make it any less fun when it happens.
If you want reminders that this is “just another superhero movie,” you can find them anywhere you look in Shazam! Fury of the Gods. There’s a post-credits scene that involves a villain in a prison cell, making this about the 13th superhero movie with that exact post-credits scene. The thing is, at this stage, no one can reasonably expect to keep feeding the machine while also breaking the mould. The most important thing for a superhero movie to be is fun, and Fury of the Gods clears that bar rather easily.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is currently playing in cinemas.