SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological. sociological*

I gave the 2019 SHAZAM a lukewarm review, and FURY OF THE GODS is just more of the same.

Four years have passed since the Shazam Fanily defeated Sivana and Shazam broke the magic staff that had bestowed mystic powers on the villain. As superheroes Billy and his fellow adoptees have become celebrated figures, for all that the public doesn't have an official name for any of them. The tedious running joke about all the goofy names people use for them is probably the result of potential legal issues between Original Captain Marvel, owned by DC, and Imitation Captain Marvel, owned by Marvel Comics. But knowing that doesn't make the joke any more tolerable. On an even less interesting note, because of the passage of time, Billy is reaching the age where he, unlike his pseudo-siblings, will be aged out of the foster-home he shares with the others. Shazam also suffers from "impostor syndrome," the feeling that he doesn't deserve to be a hero.

Since the Wizard who gave the Shazam Family their powers is in mystic exile, no one knew back then that the breaking of the staff released three ancient deities, the Daughters of Atlas, from imprisonment: Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu) and Anthea (Rachel Zegler). The audience doesn't see Anthea in the early part of the story, for it's one of the "who cares" reveals that she assumes a mortal identity and goes undercover. Her mission: to chat up one of the heroes in his plainclothes ID of Freddy Freeman and set him up. Meanwhile, the other two goddesses steal the broken staff, force the Wizard to repair it, and use its powers to create a force-field prison around Philadelphia. 

The various schemes of the Daughters center around gaining a magical Golden Apple, which Hespera wants to use to revive their unearthly realm, while vengeful Kalypso wants to use the Apple to destroy Earth. The Shazam heroes oppose them, but the Daughters, even without the help of defector Anthea, have the powers to de-power the good guys without even making them speak their magic words. In addition, Kalypso conjures up Ladon, a titanic dragon, to help in her destruction of the mortal world.

This muddled script evidently derived its gimcrack concepts from the Eleventh Labor of Heracles. In that story, Heracles needed to find the Golden Apples (note the plural) in the land of the Hesperides. But only the Titan Atlas could access that land and take the apples from their sacred tree, guarded by the dragon Ladon. Heracles took over Atlas' job of holding up the sky while the Titan secured the bounty, and despite Atlas's intention to leave Heracles in the lurch, he got tricked into resuming his own "labor."

None of the connections to Classic Greek myth add up to anything in terms of symbolic discourse, so the writers might as well have made up their characters from whole cloth. However, though the heroes are generally dull-- though the other six make "Not Captain Marvel" look all the better-- I liked the CGI dragon, and its climactic fight with Shazam is a much better superhero battle than anything in the 2019 film. I'm not surprised the film underperformed, though at least it wasn't a completely stupid script, like the one for BLACK ADAM.

There are assorted DC guest-stars worked into the story, such as Wonder Woman, Amanda Waller, and two characters from the awful PEACEMAKER series, and there's also a reference to the Justice Society that made an earlier appearance in BLACK ADAM. The only significant guest stars are those in a mid-credits sequence, in which an imprisoned Doctor Sivana forges future plans with Mister Mind, who had been loosely referenced in SHAZAM. I don't know if this super villain team-up will ever come to pass given FURY's flop status, but it's probably material that current Hollywood writers could handle better than the botched execution of Greek myth in this flick.