First Take: Shazam!: Fury of the Gods - one in, all in

SYNOPSIS: Two years on from the events of the original film, Billy Batson and his band of foster kids turned superheroes take on a new enemy - the Sisters of Atlas - as only they know how

We all remember where we were on that weekend in 2019. You know the one. I was in a radio studio at UCLan reviewing the first Shazam film, and bigging up DC’s latest combobreaker at the time- a lot has happened since then, as we have waited for the sequel to arrive. After a lengthy delay, partly due to Covid, but mostly due to the restructure currently underway at DC’s film department (spearheaded by James Gunn), it is finally here. And sadly it just isn’t quite as playful as the first one was.

David F Sandberg returns to helm this sequel, and coming in at 2 hours 10 minutes, it packs a lot in to a relatively short runtime (for this kind of film), but like with a lot of DC’s output lately, it doesn’t know which kind of film it wants to be - sure, the light nature of the first one is still there, but the script from Henry Gayden and long-time Fast and Furious writer Chris Morgan takes the ‘Shazamily’ to darker places, ones which could be worthy of 15 certificates rather than 12s, but sadly the key problem it has is with the predictable plot. We have literally seen all of this story before- luckily it passes the 6 laugh test, which is all you can ask for with a movie of this nature. As for the other technical aspects, Gyula Pados’ cinematography is great, and taking over scoring duties is Christophe Beck - a man who knows how to score a film like this.

The cast are brilliant though, with Zachary Levi, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Adam Brody, Grace Caroline Currey, Ross Butler, Ian Chen, DJ Cotrona, Jovan Armand, Meagan Good and Faithe Herman all returning as the heroes and kids respectively, and joining them this time round is a real triple threat of Lucy Liu, Dame Helen Mirren, and last year’s breakout star (and hot off the heels of working with Spielberg) Rachel Zegler as the sisters of Atlas. It is mega obvious that they all had a lot of fun on set, especially when it comes to certain major plot points, but with the wider DC reset looming, just where will the Shazam franchise lie in Mr Gunn’s priorities? Only time will tell.

THE VERDICT

It feels like the sheer amount of delays have hit the momentum of this franchise - we’ve seen lots of these kinds of sequels, especially with some of the ‘connect the dot’ plot points we have in this film, but it’s ultimately gonna break even, which is all Warner are fussed about at the minute. Whether DC can return to the absolute height of their power (like last year’s The Batman did) all hinges on The Flash now.

RATING: 3/5