130 min | PG-13 | March 17, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Billy Batson and his foster siblings share one superpower and a lot of teenage anxiety. The Daughters of Atlas arrive to take the magic back and wreck the city doing it. The kids are charming. The movie around them is a mess.
Billy Batson is a teenager who turns into an adult superhero by shouting a magic word. He and his five foster siblings each share the gift. They patrol Philadelphia as a team and get mocked for sloppy work. Three ancient goddesses, the Daughters of Atlas, arrive to reclaim the stolen power of the gods. The film wants to be about a found family learning to trust each other. It buries that idea under three villains, a CGI dome, and a bestiary of monsters it has no time to develop.
Zachary Levi plays the adult Shazam as a grown man doing a fourteen-year-old’s bit, and the bit wears thin fast. Asher Angel gets almost nothing to do as the human Billy because the script keeps him in costume. Jack Dylan Grazer is the best thing here as Freddy Freeman, the disabled kid who actually wants to be a hero. He carries the early stretch alone and gives it real stakes. Rachel Zegler plays Anthea with a warmth the screenplay refuses to build into anything. Adam Brody, Ross Butler, and D.J. Cotrona return as the adult versions of the siblings and stand around waiting for jokes.
David F. Sandberg directs from a script by Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan, and the seams show in every scene. Sandberg came out of horror, and you can see it in the few minutes that work. The hospital sequence with a unicorn and a horde of mythological beasts has actual staging and tension. The rest is flat coverage of green-screen plates. The score by Christophe Beck strains to manufacture emotion the editing never earns. The big action collapses into a brown digital soup of falling buildings where you cannot tell who is fighting whom.
The first film worked because it stayed small and let the joke breathe. This one mistakes more for better. It piles on villains, monsters, dimensions, and stakes, and dilutes everything that made the original land. There is a decent small movie about teenagers and responsibility hiding inside this bloated thing. Sandberg and the cast never get to make it.