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Shazam: Fury of the Gods–Dumb Divinity, but with a Successful Side of Silly

A movie review by Nicholas Driscoll

Sometimes love and care, when applied to the wrong part of a film, can feel like sloppiness, or a lack of craft. Shazam: Fury of the Gods has gotten a nasty trouncing by the critics and has bombed out badly at the box office, with many finding the movie shallow and unfulfilling, all spectacle with little of the heart from the first film. While I think such complaints may be merited from a particular point of view (especially in reference to some weak baddies and convoluted MacGuffin chasing), I am not sure as a whole the movie lacks the tender loving care that some critics attest, and I can’t help but wonder if in a few years audiences might rediscover this film as a minor hidden gem.

The story follows the daughters of Atlas arriving to steal that broken Shazam scepter from the first film. When Billy broke the scepter, he opened up congress between worlds, and the daughters of Atlas (Kalypso and Hespera) crossed over on a mission of vengeance. See, the powers of Shazam actually are stolen from six “gods”—his name is actually an acronym of those gods. Shazam is supposed to have the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury—where the families of these other gods are is never mentioned. Shazam and his Captain Marvel family have become dysfunctional in their mission to protect Fawcett City, causing a lot of damage and goofing off while saving lives, a problem that has gotten to the point that they have received mocking nicknames. Kalypso and Hespera create a massive energy dome around the city, trapping everyone inside, and begin the hunt for Shazam and co—as well as searching for a mysterious seed that they want to grow a tree (though I personally got a little confused about why they wanted the apple, and how they were going to get back Atlas’ powers, and what exactly they were going for). As the story progresses, Billy Batson/Shazam must deal with his insecurities about his future, the splintering of his team, and his past failures as the deadly goddesses attack the city and unleash an army of monsters to create a transformed world.

Much digital ink and video noise has already been shared about any number of failings in Shazam 2, which is already a massive failure at the box office, and is receiving widespread derision from the fans who bothered to attend. Much of the derision stems from shallow and seemingly thoughtless character work and poorly constructed worldbuilding, as well as an overall step down in heart and storytelling from the first film (bizarrely, the easter egg from the last movie has very little payoff here, and despite Shazam’s archnemesis receiving a movie just three months ago in theaters, Black Adam is never mentioned in the entire movie). Some of the complaints (which are understandable) include wafer-thin and predictable villains with cliched bad-guy lines; an even more childish and downright stupid characterization for Shazam despite Billy Batson’s more mature stature; and for me anyway confusing powers irregularly used and badly executed in the film. It’s been a while since I sat through the original Shazam, and so my memory is cloudy with a chance of forgetfulness, but methinks the humor in Shazam 2 feels a bit degraded, with many gags not quite landing.

A big part of these issues probably comes down to how Billy Batson’s utter absence for 98% or more of the movie. Seriously, the actor maybe trips onto stage in two scenes, briefly—and I thought they were decent scenes! This is the MAIN CHARACTER of the film, the protagonist, and he barely even appears. Now I know what you’re thinking—Shazam is the main character, Shazam is Billy Batson, how can you say that the main character of the movie doesn’t appear in the film? And yeah, okay, I hear you, and you make a good point… but Shazam here, he is barely Batson at all.

As mentioned previously, Shazam is uber immature in this movie. With his big expressions and idiotic shallow thoughts, I kept thinking this guy, he supposed to be like five years old. This is a weird choice, because Batson is seventeen in this movie—coming up on eighteen, worried about “graduating out” and losing his foster family. He is practically an adult. And I think you can take Batson hiding inside Shazam as our hero worried about facing the truth of his situation. Maybe his immature behavior also is meant as a way to shield himself from maturity, that he acts like a doofus because he doesn’t want to cross that threshold into adult life. You can read it that way, but I am not sure the film intends such a reading. After all, Batson/Shazam seems to want to be a good leader. He seems to want to create solid plans and turn around the Captain Marvel team so that everyone can work together well and they can overcome their negative reputation. And we never see Batson hint that he wants to be a dopey kid. When Batson appears on the screen, he immediately seems ten times more mature than Shazam. This despite the fact that Shazam is supposed to possess the wisdom of Solomon—a problem in the script that is lampshaded in the dialogue! But folks, mentioning the problem doesn’t make it go away! (Lampshading is an ongoing issue in the movie, and continues with a 6,000-year-old goddess falling in love with and dating a minor—a major plot point, and its creepiness is pointedly remarked upon… and ignored.)

So why is Shazam so incredibly stupid in this movie? Again, this comes down to a weak script. In the end, Shazam has to put his life on the line in a dramatic way, but I am not convinced that he was ever unwilling to do such heroic deeds in the face of danger. He isn’t shown to be a coward, it isn’t part of his apparent character arc that he was unable to be brave at the beginning and only capable of sacrifice by the end. Unless we are to interpret his fear of losing his family (including his fellow super fam members) as a lack of bravery? There is a line towards the end that seems to indicate that his acts of daring do qualify him for being a genuine god—but that never seemed like his goal, either.

This sort of vague character motivation plagues other aspects of the story, too. Hespera and Kalypso are both very bland as villains, despite the talents of their respective actors, and even their goal can feel unfocused. They seem upset that Shazam possesses the power of Atlas (his strength), and so they try to zap the power away from our hero with the staff—but then they seem more concerned about this fruit that Shazam has in his chamber of secrets for some reason. How Shazam got the fruit isn’t clear—it may have been mentioned, but the delivery felt muddled to me. It’s not entirely clear what good the fruit will do Hespera and Kalypso once they get it, though there are some gestures at the idea the fruit will restore the villains’ world somehow. So did the wizard who gave Batson his powers steal the fruit and destroy Hespera and Kalypso’s magical dwelling for some reason? If so, why? We don’t know. It feels very arbitrary.

However, if you can embrace the arbitrariness as a standard classic superhero story element, you can still find a lot to enjoy in this movie. The cockeyed storytelling and half-wit motivations feel like golden-age comic book poppycock, which has its dream-like charm. Yes, the inner workings of the story are a maze of contradictions, the world-building is a mystical colander, and the character motivations are a mess, and the character arcs are poorly constructed—but there is still a true sense of head-down, all-in fun that the movie delivers. Over and over throughout the film I was noticing clever touches and background details, set dressing, and cute lines that helped forecast plot developments. The movie has a cheerful devil-may-care attitude that carries the movie, injecting it with a freewheeling charm that pulled me along with the ricocheting narrative and allowed me the space to overlook some of its narrative weak points. For example, I totally dig Freddy Freeman’s wacky t-shirt design.

Plus we get a host of monsters and excellent effects. The army of creatures springs right out of folklore and legend and betrays an affection for classic monster films, especially with the design of a certain Cyclops that is an obvious tribute to Ray Harryhausen and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The main dragon, too, is more than just your usual reptilian dinosaur with wings—its called Ladon (Radon in Japanese, which is also the name of a famous pterosaur kaiju from Toho’s Godzilla franchise), and its made from a tree. It’s a plant beasty, so its bark is as bad as its bite because its bite has bark… you know what I mean.

There… is a lot to be annoyed about in Shazam: Fury of the Gods. I had to restrain myself from complaining about some bits (a bizarre homing magic blast, for example, or an excruciatingly long scene where Ladon menaces two main characters without actually killing them for absolutely no reason than plot armor). Still, I walked out of the theater grinning because it’s the kind of movie that screams freedom of silliness, that gives permission just to laugh and have a good time, that resists the gloomy storytelling that occasionally pervades action cinema, and that embraces a bright and optimistic color palette in a time when because of health and a world that seems constantly on the edge of collapse, I need some cheer, man. Shazam 2 gave me some of that happy juice. I’m just thankful for that. 

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Taste of Cherry review–on finding meaning in boredom?

Will the Taste of Cherry save or destroy? Art by me.

Most of my life I have loved movies, but I have mostly prioritized genre flicks, often with a particular focus on the cheesiest, stupidest movies I could find—even going so far as to celebrate “Stupid Movie Night” as a youth, and regularly gathering with friends with horrendous movies such as the South African ET rip off Nukie (1987) or the “Christian” anti-drug horror film Blood Freak (1972) to laugh and gasp at and wish for my money back. Recently I decided to explore the opposite end of the quality spectrum and began investigating lists of the greatest films ever made. Enter Taste of Cherry, a 1997 Iranian film by celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami. As I’ve been watching films like Taste of Cherry or the Russian Mirror (1975) or Italy’s 8 ½ (1963), I noticed how much these movies demand to be evaluated on a different set of criteria than my usual taste for excitement, or camp, or clever stories. In the case of Taste of Cherry, a movie which apparently had no script, which largely did not use professional actors, and which can come across as confusing and mysterious, I found myself bewildered as to how to evaluate the experience.

The plot is simple and tragic—a middle-aged man named Badii is driving around Tehran looking for someone to help him commit suicide. The details of why he is pursuing this end are never explained and barely hinted at. Most of the action of the film features him meeting a new person, explaining his situation and his request, and the resulting (often awkward) conversation. Some of these conversations are depicted on screen with his vehicle seen driving around dusty roads while we hear the spoken words as mere audio played across the desolate imagery, but we don’t see the actors and their reactions. If there is narrative tension, it mostly comes from the idea of the premise and whether Badii will go through with his plan to its fatal end.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, according to multiple sources I found, the movie had no script, and instead the director rode about with the actors and prompted them to speak in character. This decision profoundly effects the tone of the film, with the actors (many of whom apparently were not actors at all) deliver their lines in a stilted, unemotional manner that nevertheless sometimes hits home on an emotional level. After all, the entire story is about Badii asking a series of individuals to help him kill himself. The characters don’t really have deep relationships with each other, and the situation is surreal in the first place. The fact that their reactions to one another can feel a bit robotic seems appropriate to the surreality of the situation—compounded by the almost complete lack of music, and the ambiguity of character motivations and back story.

Knowing that the film had no real script, too, puts a different pressure on the dialogue performed. Perhaps my greatest pleasure after viewing the movie was debating the meaning of the film and the motivations of the characters with my former coworker who volunteered to view the film with me, and so we teased out the film’s artistic choices, and talked about the confusing conclusion. But if the movie was not closely planned, if the script was not even written out, then the meanings we tried to pick apart feel like happy coincidences, like a found poem. It can feel like a cheat, like as an audience member we are being invited to search for and construct meaning out of phantoms that had little craft. After all, Roger Ebert counted Taste of Cherry as one of his “hated films,” and his excoriation can still be read online on a website devoted to chronicling his most vitriolic movie reviews.

Yet… the movie remains one of the most celebrated films ever made. Does it not deserve its reputation? So much of film criticism can feel like an artificial pursuit built more on popularity polling and celebration-for-celebration’s sake, a construction of cinema canon clicked together from hazy critical parameters that slightly tweaked or re-focused could easily produce a completely different list of champion films. As different people will have different aesthetic focuses or may gravitate to film based on emotional or circumstantial meanings, and there are no universal “film quality” rules, nor have all the critics viewed the entire range of movies made in the world, the distinction of moving picture greatness seems even thinner, even harder to grasp or evaluate. For example, director Kiarostami claimed in an interview (viewable on the Criterion Channel streaming service) that he didn’t like movies that told a story or that aimed for emotions and that he prefers “films that put their audience to sleep in the theater”—a maverick delineation of quality if I ever saw one! I would further say that, once a film has been recognized as “one of the greats,” too, they become difficult to criticize—as if the movie is now immune to jeering because of the armor of reputation and the any critic could open themselves to the counter accusation that they lack artistic sensitivities. I mean, heck, that’s half the reason I am even writing this review or watching interviews trying to figure out why this movie is so beloved!

Still, perhaps because I was searching so hard to find something to enjoy in the movie, I did find it. Perhaps because I wanted so badly to discover artistic merit and purpose and depth, I inserted my own. I think there is value in that, too. Maybe there is more value in searching for the positive qualities in film and art regardless of its pedigree, regardless of whether the film snobs recognize this or that work as a superior piece fit for display in the equivalent of a motion picture museum.

The taste of cherry in the title is a reference to where Badii wants to die (under a cherry tree), and further to a line from one of the characters Badii tries to talk into helping him kill himself. The man in question tries to talk Badii out of his morbid task, and gives various reasons to find meaning in life—including the succulent taste of a cherry. Because of that one line, and because of the proposed death location, the oncoming ominous conclusion sizzles with a sense of a confluence of meaning The cherry taste seems to pull for life and for death simultaneously depending on the perspective of the viewer, since Badii wants to die under that tree, and his acquaintance wants him to live to enjoy a delicious cherry one more time—all against the backdrop of Tehran and the wandering cast of immigrants and secondary drifters Badii encounters, and their common, limping life concerns.

Does that sense of meaning make Taste of Cherry a standout for artistic merit above, say, a great sci-fi film with clever effects, a comedy with crafted gags that transcend culture and time and place to elicit giggles from all ages, or a tightly plotted and expertly edited action-suspense thriller that supercharges the heart to run? I don’t think it does, as each of those kinds of films serves different functions, and require different kinds of valuable artistry that can be evaluated in different ways. But I still appreciate Taste of Cherry for expanding my palate and helping me to find a new taste to enjoy my life today. And that’s enough for me to recommend it!