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Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

I enjoyed Shazam! when it came out in 2019, I thought that they did a good job of making a superhero character I didn’t know about and making them interesting. So here we are with the belated sequel (belated probably because of the pandemic) and to say that its a step down from the previous film would be quite the understatement. 

There are many things that don’t work with this film. Primarily the trio of Anthea, Kalypso & Hesperian who are supposed to be on the same side but don’t appear like that. It seems to be Hesperian & Kalypso vs Anthea. They rarely seem to be on the same page so if you were smart then you could just let them take each other out. There is also a potentially cynical piece of casting because Rachel Zegler is clearly a lot younger than both Lucy Liu and Helen Mirren and it would appear that they have cast Zegler purely so it seems more logical when she flirts or develops feelings for Freddy.


There is also the Wonder Woman problem. So there is a scene where we just see the back of Wonder Woman’s head because it's implied to Gal Gadot but then Gadot appears at the very end for what appears to be a crowbar in the scene. Nothing seems to make sense, which is really weird because the first one worked very well. It’s a clear example of making a film just because the previous one was a commercial success and not having a single clue what to do with it. It does have an interesting end credits scene where Shazam! meets Emilia and John from the Peacemaker series although this might be crowbarred in at James Gunn’s request to work into his DCU plans. 


Overall I was disappointed with this film. It’s a massive step down from the previous one and think that it serves as a good reason why films should stop trying to make films tie into other films and have things that are going to be referenced into other TV shows or things several years down the road because people will less likely to watch this film again or think that it was good if they have to watch other films for this to make sense.
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