Let’s get this Shazam on the road, 3.5 readers.
The bad news is that the DCU cinematic is in a sorry state of affairs. Warner Brothers, IMO, screwed the pooch, opting to rush flicks out in a frenzied attempt to compete with Marvel, rather than go the slow route and build a coherent universe where all the films connect to one another, as Marvel made. They might have lost profits by going slow in the beginning but now, as the Marvel universe begins to slow down and fizzle out, DCU would be hitting its stride.
Where DCU has done its best is with characters that heretofore never had much in the way of movie fanfare. Thus Wonder Woman and Aquaman have been knocking it out of the park. Meanwhile, Shazam, who is, one might argue, DC’s joke character (like how Antman is Marvel’s joke character), is also great. You would think old standards like Batman and Superman would be best but they’ve been done so much that apparently no one knows how to weave them into this world.
For those of you who don’t remember the first Shazam, Billy Badsen is a foster kid, very sad and lonely when a wizard bestows upon him god-like superpowers. By saying “Shazam!” he turns from wayward boy to adult champion (Asher Angel plays young Billy while Zachary Levi plays Shazam Billy.)
The cool part of a sequel is it gets to build the universe. You already learned the rules from the first film so now the writers can waste no time inviting you to play in the sandbox. Billy and his foster family of siblings all have Shazam powers now and they use them to save Philadelphia from catastrophe and villainy. Alas, they are often unappreciated as the populace wonders who appointed them to watch over the city and the news media focuses on their mistakes rather than all the lives they save.
Enter into this mix Hespera and Kalypso (Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu), daughters of the titan Atlas, who have a bone to pick with the Shazam family or Shazamily for an inadvertent mistake they made in the first film. The world, of course, is at stake and the sisters have all kinds of ghastly powers from being able to make people go insane to conjuring up dragons and monsters.
It’s up to the Shazamily to save the day and they’ll do so while navigating the pitfalls of growing up. When you have a movie about kids who sometimes operate in adult bodies, there’s always a line that has to be straddled about what is and is not appropriate, and the writers and actors walk it well with various jokes where the kids in adult bodies and adult actors playing those kids come across as naive and not understanding of various situations where an actual adult would know better.
Djimon Hounsou reprises his role as the Wizard who gave the kids their powers, at times glad and disappointed he did, depending on how well the battles are going.
Perhaps you might remember there was a Superman from the neck down cameo in the last film and at that time I opined it kinda sucked that WB/DC isn’t able to bring all their talent together in the way Marvel/Disney did. There’s a cameo from another top hero, this time from the neck up, indicating Shazam has convinced the execs that such appearances are worth the money. Still, while it’s a good movie, I just think DC missed an opportunity to really build a world the way Marvel did.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Shazam it today on Max.
Bookshelf Battle 