Yep. We’re doing this. I meant what I said at the end of the Smile review: I can’t keep holding onto my experience with Lights Out, and I can’t keep holding that directly against David F. Sandberg to the point of boycotting his films out of sheer pettiness. Life’s too short for that shit. So, along with recently and finally checking out the first Shazam (it’s an alright movie, but very uneven), here I am reviewing its sequel. And quite frankly, I think life’s too short to be dealing with this either.
What made the first film stand out was its high concept core: Tom Hanks in Big, but as a superhero. It’s an approach that fits a character who literally switches between being a child and being a superpowered adult through magic, and while the ‘homages’ to its inspiration got a bit on-the-nose, it was a solid throughline for the film around it. A throughline that this film seems to lack entirely, as it is all over the bloody place.
Expanding from that initial take on the character, this follow-up incorporates many other aspects of the character’s mythos. It’s a superhero story, but it also involves wizards, magic, flying books, self-writing pens, and other such Harry Potter-ish things, and Shazam’s origin has to do with the Greek Gods, so they’re involved in this as well, with the main villains being the daughters of the Greek Titan Atlas (The first ‘A’ in the acronym Shazam), along with a bunch of creatures from Greek legend and mythology. And the sound these things make when they clang together is deafening.
It is quite bizarre that, in tapping deeper into the source material that gives Shazam his uniqueness amongst the DC pantheon, the film has somehow only gotten more derivative and generic, and the aesthetic pulls aren’t the only example of this taking place. There’s also all manner of picked-up-and-dropped character arcs for the characters (Mary studying for college, Freddie and his late-night solo adventures, Ross making a map out of the enormous array of magical doors in their lair), all of which only serve to clutter up the narrative even further. To say nothing of the Daughters of Atlas, who have something of a decent motive in how they’re avenging their father, whose power is now shared amongst the Shazam family, but it never even comes close to dealing with the moral grey areas that motive invokes and just succumbs to a basic-bitch ‘humans bad, destroy everything’ plot. How very interesting.
But worst of all is easily Shazam himself, who manages to have both stunted character growth and full-blown character regression between the first film and this. Asher Angel as the now-older Billy Batson is all well and good, and there’s a definite showing that he’s in a different place (not necessarily better, but still different) than he was before. Zachary Levi as Shazam, on the other hand, is still acting like he’s barely entered adolescence, despite Billy being nearly eighteen. The disconnect between these two certainly explains why Angel is noticeably absent from a lot of the film, with Levi’s mugging schtick taking centre stage… and man, where the first film had its definite moments of cringe, this is just embarrassing to look at. It doesn’t help that his hero arc for this film cribs quite a bit from Zack Snyder’s take on Superman, right up to a suspiciously-familiar ending, showing that just because Snyder isn’t at the helm anymore doesn’t mean that the DCEU is having any less of a problem with just repeating the same take on superhero stories over and over again.
Then there’s the outright strange decisions that went into making this. Take Wonder Woman for example, who technically appears in this twice. Once as part of a dream sequence, which results in a moment that effectively dethrones Granny’s Peach Tea for the biggest WTF moment of the DCEU, and again during the Dawn Of Justice redux conclusion. Somehow, her appearance here is even more wasteful than Superman’s in Black Adam, especially since it brings out another disconnect in how this is a film about the children of Greek Gods… and yet the DC’s own child of a Greek God is largely absent for some strange reason. To say nothing of how Billy Batson’s teenaged pining for Wonder Woman is treated in-film (along with a similar romantic subplot involving Freddie and Rachel Zegler’s Anne), once again highlighting that double standard about relationships between men and women that always gets my hackles up.
It also tries to be cute with meta-humour, a la Deadpool, but it hits a particularly weird note when it brings up Fast & Furious by name, complete with the ‘it’s about family’ meme. I mean, yeah, the first Shazam was also a patently ridiculous action film where every other word was about found family, but it didn’t really need to be pointed out this blatantly. And just in case this wasn’t trite enough, I should mention that this film was co-written by Chris Morgan, the guy who penned most of the F&F sequels.
There’s also the product placement, another thing that feels carried over from Snyderverse Superman (Man Of Steel in particular), and not since Space Jam has this kind of shit felt so intrusive. There’s random mentions of Gatorade and the like, but then we get into the Skittles… why, oh why, is there so much Skittles product placement, to the extent that they become a crucial plot point during the third act? Where this gets worse is that, in the process of being absolutely without shame in shilling for fruit-flavoured candy, the film even invokes an over-a-decade-old meme from a Nostalgia Critic video. I am not even joking. I never thought it was possible to make me annoyed by superheroes riding murderous attack unicorns into battle, but that one-two punch certainly managed it. Congrats.
The first Shazam… had its problems. The constantly switching between the superpowered 80s comedy thing with the title character, and the Sam Raimi horror-inspired framing for the scenes with Dr. Sivana as the villain, made for a bumpy sit, not helped by the aforementioned cringey dialogue. But holy hell, this makes that film look like Richard Donner’s Superman by comparison. As much as I liked how Jack Dylan Frazer as Freddie turns out here, and if he was the main character, I would probably be much kinder to this film overall, he sadly isn’t enough to make up for the rubbernecking display of baffling choices and just plain bad storytelling that is the rest of it.
I said I was done with holding a grudge towards Sandberg over Lights Out and I meant it (even if a certain scene here featuring a similarly cavalier attitude towards a character killing themselves gave me a twinge of regret about that decision), but seeing him deliver this much of a catastrophic mess isn’t exactly boosting my opinion of him either. I said it before about Black Adam, and I mean it even more emphatically here: The DC reboot cannot come fast enough, if this is the direction they’re headed otherwise.
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