Shazam! Fury Of The Gods

Nicked Fury

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods
USA 2023 Directed by David F. Sandberg
Warner Bros
UK cinema release print

Warning: Very minor spoilers but there’s no way I’m giving away the ending or the really important cameo in this review.

Wow. This film is awesome. And if you want to take that as my final, less detailed verdict of the film so you don’t feel like you need to read to the end, please do so.

And it’s not just the awesome cameo towards the end of the movie where an amazing character restores a semblance of the status quo to things here... although that scene was so brilliant it had me crying by the finish. Nope... the whole film is a great, fun and respectful sequel to the first movie, which was a little better than this but... this being only slightly less better than absolutely brilliant is still pretty good, I reckon.

Okay, there are a few negative criticisms I have to make about this one and I’ll get those out of the way first because, yeah, they don’t even begin to make a negative dent in the movie and I can’t wait to get this thing on Blu Ray (partially because I saw this at Cineworld and I’m guessing the physical copy will be more in focus than how they projected it there).

So, okay, I was disappointed that the big dramatic beat from the first one of Mary Bromfield (still not yet revealed in this iteration as really being Mary Batson, Billy’s sister he didn’t even know he had) getting into college is sidelined to a throwaway scene explaining why she didn’t go. I thought the emotional investment in this character set up in the first film wasn’t given it’s due, to be honest.

Another negative thing was... I didn’t quite understand the physics of the big dome utilised by the villains in this one. It has certain physical properties in one scene which are completely forgotten about in a later scene but, yeah, I guess anything is possible when you’re dealing with magic.

Thirdly, but not so much of a big deal... one of the best lines in the trailers for the movie, about throwing a truck at a dragon, didn’t make final cut... which is a shame. However, the pacing of the scene in question is such that it would have slowed things down unnecessarily and been less credible so I suspect it was better out than in, in this instance.

That’s it. Those are my only negative things about the film. The rest is absolutely brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The cast from the original film, including stand up performances by Asher Angel as Billy Batson, Zachary Levi as Captain Marvel (because, two fingers up at Marvel who ‘legally acquired the name for one of their own characters... luckily, many audience members past a certain age can still remember what the name of the Worlds Mightiest Mortal is), Jack Dylan Grazer as Freddy Freeman (like the first movie, he’s basically the lead kid in this film), Grace Caroline Currey as Mary Bromfield (and Mary Marvel... again, lets call her by her real character name for the purposes of this review) and a load of other returners are all great here. And, by golly they sure fooled me in the first film because, apparently, this is Grace Caroline Currey’s first time playing her super hero alter ego. The girl they had in the first film (which I reviewed here) looked so much like her I just assumed it was the same actress playing both roles in that one so... yeah, don’t know why they bothered with someone else in the original.

And this lot are joined by some nice additions including a couple of super villains played by Dame Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu and, also, a nice turn from Rachel Zegler (in her second film, after playing Maria in Spielberg’s quite good remake of West Side Story). Plus a couple of cameos but, seriously, that one towards the end of the picture... absolutely gave me a huge rush of emotion (while simultaneously keeping me angry at James Gunn... more on that anger in a little while). One thing I did miss was the sequel set up from the post credits of the previous movie but... the final post credits scenes here (there are two of them) is very much a sequel to the post credits of the first. So, yeah, if the direction of DC hadn’t suddenly changed then that talking earth worm ‘Mr. Mind and the Society Of Evil’ adaptation story may well have been coming along at some point.

I’m not covering the plot here but the film is full of great little references both to other comic book characters (including little digs at rival company Marvel) and also some great pop culture references in general. Such as the ‘pediatrician’ scene from the trailer... I’d already spotted the haunted doll from The Conjuring movies in the shot in the previews but I’m happy to say Annabelle remains in the finished movie here. And a nice moment where a guy on the street calls the main character Captain Marvel... and he’s not only played by Michael Gray, who used to play Billy Batson in the Shazam TV series in the 1970s but he’s even wearing the same t-shirt costume he wore in it. And, wow, I love the symmetry of having a character originally co-created for Fawcett Comics (before DC bought the rights years later) by C. C. Beck, get a score by composer Christophe Beck. I mean, I doubt they’re related but, even so.

Oh... and I’m not even going to say anything about the wonderful Unicorns or the fact that the makers of Skittles must have paid a fair amount of money for their quite prominent plot point of a product placement... but I don’t care because, even if it will date the movie some years from now, it was just delightfully done.

And, well, it’s such a good movie with a brilliant, post bad gal defeat denouement scene that, in light of the first of the post-credits scenes here, you just have to hate James Gunn’s new DCU ending policy even more. After Blue Beetle, The Flash and the second Aquaman movie have played out in cinemas later this year, the decision has been made to pull the plug on the current movie DC universe with even their most highly anticipated movie originally on the slate, Wonder Woman 3, completely cancelled. So no more Henry Cavill as Superman (as set up at the end of Black Adam) and no more Justice Society (not to mention the Justice League). The whole thing sucks but these movies are teasing and building towards a series of event movies that will now, unless DC does an about turn sometime very soon, won’t happen. So yeah, while I’d like to see another Wonder Woman and a Justice League/Justice Society team up movie where they take on Black Adam before becoming his ally to ward off some greater evil... it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now. Which is a huge pity, especially after DC have finally seemed to have been gaining traction after their earlier cinematic efforts didn’t quite get things right, it all seems to have been scuppered... unnecessarily, it seems to me.

But don’t let that sourness put you off going to see what is probably the best superhero movie that’s going to be in cinemas this year. I suspect Shazam! Fury Of The Gods might well make my top ten movies of 2023, by the end of it... time will tell, I guess.

Fall

Dashed
Descent

Fall
UK/USA 2022
Directed by Scott Mann
Signature Entertainment

Warning: Very slight spoilers you would just pick up from watching the trailer.

Well then, Fall is a film I initially couldn’t care less about when I first saw the poster advertising on the internet. Why? Well, it bore the legend “From the producers of 47 Metres Down” which, frankly, I thought was pretty unremarkable and not something I would want to waste my time with again (I still haven’t bothered with the sequel... maybe I’ll get around to that one day). However, two things came to light about this movie which, for better or worse, made me change my mind...

One was that the always brilliant Alan Jones said it was a sensational movie and selected it to play in this years marvellous FrightFest. So if I was going to take a recommendation from anyone it was going to be him. Secondly, when I watched the trailer, I realised that I really liked the lead actress. The lead of the two main protagonists here, Becky Connor, is played by none other as Grace Caroline Currey, who was an absolutely brilliant version of Mary Marvel/Mary Batson/Mary Bromley in “The Original Captain Marvel” movie SHAZAM! And if you don’t know who Mary Marvel is and why she’s Captain Marvel’s brother, read my review of that first movie here where she’s billed under her previous acting name of Grace Fulton. She’s pretty amazing in that and also in this too... so, yeah, now I had two reasons to see the film. So, you know, I did.

The film starts off with a scene where Becky, her husband Dan (played, briefly, by Mason Gooding) and their best friend Hunter (played by Virginia Gardner) are climbing a mountain and Dan falls to his death. One year on from that... or 51 weeks on, actually, according to the on screen legend... Becky is a complete mess, draining her sorrows in alcohol, estranged from her loving father (played by the great Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and about to end her life with a rather sloppily executed and ‘doomed to fail’ (it has to be said) overdose of pills and whisky. Then her friend Hunter, absent for a year... err.... 51 weeks... turns up on her doorstep and says she needs to pull her life back together, lose the fear and climb a huge radio tower in the middle of nowheresville desert land which also happens to be the fourth tallest structure in America. There are ladders going up about two thirds of the way and then another hard climb after those. And so they do.

Now I’ve never really understood why people would be stupid enough to put themselves in harms way just to climb something tall and so, honestly, everything which happens to these two just makes me cross my arms, after wagging my finger and saying, “You’ve only got yourselves to blame.” And, once they’re up the top (not including the thin spire but, yeah, that comes later as a survival attempt), after lots of vertigo inducing shots of shaking, unstable metal structures, wobbly screws about to come undone at any second plus aggressive buzzards, not to mention the constant stops and hurdles of Becky’s emotional baggage... the inevitable happens and the ladders all fall away from the mast, leaving the girls stranded miles from nowhere, up a very, very tall structure with no phone signal because of their current height. The rest of the movie details how they attempt to survive and try and get out of this mess.

And... okay, I had a relatively fun time with it, I would say. There are some terrible moments such as a certain twist on the relationship between the three original mountain climbers which, honestly, I can’t say I wasn’t expecting... I’ve been kinda conditioned to expect certain complications in modern thrillers over the last 20 or so years (this guy must be a fan of The Descent... and who isn’t?). That being said, there was at least one twist towards the end which I didn’t see coming outright although I could see the inspiration for this sudden revelation for Becky too so, it was an easy one to accept once it was brought to light (um... yeah... I did say I think this guy must be a fan of The Descent, right?). One of the nice things about that is that there were two sequences in the film with the usual, ‘it’s not all that bad, it was just a dream’ wake up moments and, by the time we got to the second one, I was sick and tired of the old ‘waking moments’ cheap shot cliché being used more than once in a movie but, when you get to the final reveal, it actually makes more sense that the director is trying to condition the audience to that kind of mentality in order to pull off the last, falling brick of a twist more acceptably... so, yeah, I can see why he did it like that.

And all in all, the film is very well acted, especially by the two female leads who you stay with pretty much for the entire movie (I think it only cuts away to another location very briefly twice towards the end of the film). Everyone was good in this, the cinematography was great, the CGI effects were awesome (because I refuse to believe the director would put his actors in this much peril in real life and removing and so... replacing vertigo inducing heights and safety equipment must surely have been done with the aid of a computer) and, all in all, I’d say that Fall was an entertaining piece of movie making which I’d probably recommend to most people.

That being said, a word of caution about censorship and the lengths studios will go to in order to get bigger profits. The original cut of the movie apparently had a lot of usage of the ‘f word’ in it. However, in order to drop it to a lower, kid friendly age rating to grab more money, the studio redubbed the lines without the f***s and then resynched the actors mouths via the magic of CGI. I didn’t notice this myself but I am aggrieved that the original cut of the movie was not used. This is where the ‘art’ of the movie gives way to the ‘movie business’ and when it loses that battle, it loses its soul.

My only other big question about the film is this... on the end credits it shows that Becky, her father and her late husband all have the same surname of Connor. Now the only possibilities I can think of for this bizarre state of affairs is that either Becky was in a strangely unlikely and coincidental dating situation at one point where she met and fell in love with someone with the exact same surname as her (and her father) or... she got incestuous and married her own brother. I’m not sure which one of these two options is more likely in real life but, yeah, it seems a bizarre set of credits and it just poses questions that one really doesn’t want to ponder, it has to be said. Still, Fall is a pretty good movie which, I can’t imagine watching a second time but was worth looking at once. Like one of Bugs Bunny’s weaponised carrots, I suspect it’s only good for one shot.