*Spoilers for Shazam! (2019)

Set roughly two years after the events of the last film, Shazam! Fury of the Gods focuses on the foster family and their struggles to balance their normal lives with their superhero ones. At the very beginning of the film, they are faced with backlash from the public when a bridge rescue goes wrong, and must deal with negative publicity, to which they weren’t already looked at very fondly anyway. However, things get even messier when a group of goddesses known as the Daughters of Atlas comes to Earth to seek revenge and get the powers they lost and believe were stolen from them back.

My favorite thing about Fury of the Gods, and the thing I believe this film does best, is having the “Shazam family” fighting together. I thought the way that the first film ended, where the foster family all get superpowers was kind of cheesy, and I wasn’t a huge fan of it overall, but I did like the concept of all of them getting superpowers, so watching them do superhero stuff together was pretty entertaining. They are definitely a unique team, obviously, with all of them being young and most of them immature.

One aspect that was definitely dialed up quite a bit for this sequel was the fantasy. This is a pure fantasy superhero film, and I really dug that. I thought that all of the different creature designs, especially the dragon, were really cool and a lot more interesting than the Seven Deadly Sins in the original Shazam!, and the CGI was significantly better here as well. This also led to some pretty cool and unique visuals and action, which I would also say was significantly better. You get a lot more large and grand-scale sequences, too, something that is definitely a lot more up my alley.

The second main character in the first movie, Freddy, played a big part in the sort of heart of that story; however, I found him to be just a little bit annoying. Thankfully, I liked him significantly more in Fury of the Gods. Being older, he was obviously a lot more mature, but also less of a downer about everything. I didn’t really pity him as much as I felt like I should have before, because he was often quite bitter. You can tell in this film that he’s simply just a lot more upbeat and positive, so I found him to be much more of a fun and compelling character.

If I had to pick one word to describe Shazam! Fury of the Gods, however, it would most certainly be “lame.” It’s about as generic as a superhero film can be, and it lacks most of the heart and charm of the first film, and I wasn’t even really a fan of that one. There’s just hardly any substance at all to it, and to be honest, I had a really hard time coming up with ideas for this movie review. It’s probably one of the hardest reviews I’ve ever made because of that.

First off, the villains are absolutely terrible. The premise was so tedious for me to write because the conflict they create is completely uninteresting. They do all of these evil things, too, but don’t come off as intimidating or scary at all because they're just a group of old magical people that don’t have anything unique or interesting about them. I can’t even really describe them; they’re just old women who are evil because the plot needs them to be. They want to restore their god’s realm, I guess, but almost no context is given as to why, at least anything that is compelling.

Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of Shazam!, I still really liked Billy’s character arc surrounding his mother and who his true family really is. In this film, it kind of reiterates that a bit at the beginning, as Billy questions whether or not he is going to be kept by his foster family or not once he turns eighteen, which was a decent setup for a decent new character arc for him, but unfortunately, the film puts that to the side until the very end. I think there were a total of two scenes that focused on that. In fact, Billy, as his younger self, was hardly in the movie at all; it was pretty much just him as a superhero the entire time.

When it comes to the third act, I have two words: “wasted potential” (which could basically describe the entire film). It sets up a much bigger and climactic final battle than the first movie had, and it certainly is, but some of the creative choices that were made were pretty poor in my opinion. I really liked watching the “Shazam family,” I guess you could call them, at the beginning, but what they decided to do with all of the siblings not named Billy was really boring, and I don’t even think they needed to be there at all. Also, when it comes to the actual ending, it’s a complete copout. You can tell they are trying to sort of tie the DCEU together a little bit with what they do, but what they do feels so forced, random, and coincidental that it’s really just off-putting.

So yeah, I really don’t have much to say about Shazam! Fury of the Gods. I probably sound a lot harsher than what the actual score I gave it would imply, but that was mainly because this was such a frustrating film to review. It’s fairly entertaining, and I loved all the fantasy stuff, but the actual story has hardly any depth, and the film is just completely forgettable.