{"id":57584,"date":"2023-03-20T12:58:39","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T16:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=57584"},"modified":"2023-03-20T12:58:43","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T16:58:43","slug":"movie-review-shazam-fury-of-the-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2023\/03\/movie-review-shazam-fury-of-the-gods\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review – Shazam! Fury of the Gods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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            Whether because of the pandemic, the constant comings-and-goings of the DC Extended Universe, or the first movie from 2019 simply not being that memorable, \u201cShazam!\u201d seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I\u2019m going to be pointing out a number of similarities between this character and Ant-Man from the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe, but a key difference is that fans noticed that Ant-Man was absent from \u201cAvengers: Infinity War\u201d in 2018. They wanted to know where he was and how he was going to tie into the larger story. Has any DCEU fan seen any of the franchise\u2019s output since 2019 and thought, \u201cI wonder where Shazam is in all this\u201d? Sure, the new movie won the weekend box office because of its genre, affiliations, and advertising, but did people go to see it because they actually care about it? Or did they feel that it\u2019s their job to see new tentpole releases, no matter how little they care? I went because I had a \u201cjob\u201d of sorts to see it for this column \u2013 and sitting through this by-the-numbers superhero dreck turned out to be a \u201cjob\u201d unto itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            A quick recap: teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has been imbued with superpowers by the wizard also named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou). All he has to do is say magic word \u201cShazam!\u201d and he turns into an adult (Zachary Levi) with powers including super speed and strength. Following the first movie, all the other kids in his foster family are similarly-powered: Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer\/Adam Brody), Eugene (Ross Butler\/Ian Chen), Pedro (Jovan Armond\/D.J. Cotrona), Darla (Faithe Herman\/Meagan Good), and Mary (Grace Caroline Currey in both forms, as the character is now an adult). All the character development the others get is that Mary passed up an opportunity to go to college, Pedro is\u2026 pretending to like baseball (handled very clumsily), and smart-aleck Freddy has a girlfriend (Rachel Zegler, making me think that the promise she showed in the \u201cWest Side Story\u201d remake was a fluke).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The family is up against the Daughters of Atlas: Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu), and a third member whose identity is secret, but I thought was fairly easy to guess. The Daughters want the staff that gives Shazam and company their powers, though they\u2019re divided on what to do with the staff once they get it. Hespera wants to fix their own world and leave Earth alone, while Kalypso wants to devastate Earth like their own world has been devastated. Seems like an issue they should have hammered out in the past few centuries, but they choose to squabble in the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Much of the film\u2019s appeal lies in its humor. All the main characters are essentially children, so there\u2019s supposedly a playful childishness to the proceedings. Zachary Levi has all the effortless charm of a Paul Rudd, so the idea is that the movie has a fun, bouncy tone with a few moments of serious coolness. Instead what we get is an overload of unfunny jokes about the characters\u2019 awkwardness, a style of humor that has sunk the last several MCU movies. I laughed at Mirren reading an un-proofread letter, but that was about it. And the action and serious scenes certainly can\u2019t carry the movie, not even with the deus ex machina (with \u201cdeus\u201d taken literally) at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cShazam! Fury of the Gods\u201d is yet another blah superhero movie in an era where it seems like all we get is blah superhero movies. I don\u2019t see it bringing in many new fans to the DCEU, nor do I even see fans of the original liking it very much. Like \u201cAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,\u201d its destiny is to do well for a weekend or two and then be discarded, because people aren\u2019t going to look back on it with fond memories. Too bad the filmmakers can\u2019t \u201cShazam!\u201d themselves into funnier people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grade: C-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShazam: Fury of the Gods\u201d is rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, and language. Its running time is 130 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver             Whether because of the pandemic, the constant comings-and-goings of the DC Extended Universe, or the first movie from 2019 simply not being that memorable, \u201cShazam!\u201d seems… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":57585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[2237],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57586,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57584\/revisions\/57586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}