’Zam lacks bam
SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS 12A ★★
Four years ago, it felt like DC’S Justice League franchise was finally turning a corner. Ben Affleck’s depressed Batman and Henry Cavill’s dour Superman were officially out, and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman seemed to set a new, lighter tone for DC’S dark “extended universe”.
Then came Shazam!, a bizarre but welcome experiment in splicing the superhero origins movie with the body swap comedy.
Sadly, as is often the case, the joke is a lot less funny on the second telling.
In this forgettable sequel, Zachary Levi returns as the titular hero – an excitable teenager in the spandex-clad body of a hulking grown-up.
Asher Angel is still playing his alter ego Billy Batson, a Philadelphian orphan who can morph into Levi’s superhero by saying the magic word “Shazam!”.
But he’s grown up a bit since we last met him. Angel’s once-dorky 14-year-old is now a serious young man contemplating being “aged out” of the foster system on his 18th birthday.
Weirdly, this seems news to Levi who is still playing a hormonal adolescent. This time, the film’s three screenwriters fail to generate any big laughs, so the formulaic nature of the plot is a lot more apparent.
Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu play it disappointingly straight as two Greek goddesses who land on Earth to seek the magical apple which will destroy the human realm.
So it falls to our Shazam and his fellow super-powered teenagers to see them off in a string of efficient but very familiar CGI fight scenes.
There’s one decent gag involving a magic pen but, too often, the comedy is based on clunky in-jokes and Levi pulling silly faces.
This teenage crime fighter really needs to grow up.
‘‘ The comedy is based on clunky in-jokes and Levi pulling silly faces