There’s a scene early in Shazam! Fury of the Gods in which the Ben Franklin Bridge is (for no clear reason) falling apart, and on that bridge a woman trapped in her car listening to Bonnie Tyler’s 80s cheese classic “Holding Out for a Hero.” It’s a silly, obvious song choice, but one that makes sense for the Shazam franchise, which is about a teenager who turns into a full-grown superhero by uttering the titular magic word. The first film had a bit of a jocular, meta feel, and setting an exciting superhero scene to “Holding Out for a Hero” is a jocular, meta move. But then, just as the car is about to plunge into the Delaware River, Shazam catches it in midair and asks the terrified woman “are you seriously listening to that song right now?,” instantly killing a joke that we all implicitly understood via over-explanation. 

This early snippet of the film acts as a microcosm of Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ myriad of problems and overall wasted promise. Like its predecessor Fury of the Gods is a fitfully funny movie, but unlike its predecessor, it doesn’t trust its audience to understand what’s happening right in front of them. Instead, the script telegraphs its every move, laboring and commenting on every joke until it isn’t funny anymore, and demanding its cast go to absurd lengths to convince is of their “wit”. Even when Fury of the Gods isn’t trying to be funny, it still fails again by falling into the same tired superhero tropes, and serving up the same poor visuals that seem to plague nearly every movie in the genre now (and that the first Shazam! avoided). Say what you will about the Marvel Cinematic Universe but, by and large, those movies tend to succeed at delivering their core audience what they want. Fury of the Gods, and a lot of the DCEU’s output, feels comparatively hollow, not just from an artistic standpoint, but from the standpoint of merely creating cohesive, comprehensible stories and characters.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to that scene on the bridge. It’s meant to act as a reintroduction to Billy Batson/Shazam (Asher Angel/Zachary Levi) and his extended family, all of whom he granted super powers at the end of the first Shazam film. A troubled kid who bounced from foster home to foster home, this act of superheroic altruism was supposed to indicate that Billy had finally come to see these people as siblings, and much of Fury of the Gods is predicated on his fear that, by virtue of him aging out of the foster system, this family unit might not stay together much longer. 

But the film doesn’t share this loving view of Billy’s brother’s and sisters. Billy/Shazam, Freddy Freeman/Shazam Jr. (Jack Dylan Glazer/Adam Brody), and Darla Dudley (Faithe Herman/Meagan Goode) all get jokes to sell during the big bridge rescue, but the rest of the family is left to flatly move distressed citizens from point A to point B and confusedly stare at severed suspension cables. The result is an action sequence shot with no style, rhythm, or punchline, and on the heels of a spoiled joke to boot. We’re told again and again how important these other siblings (Grace Caroline Currey as Mary Bromfield/Lady Shazam, Ian Chen/Ross Butler as Eugene Choi, Jovan Armand/D.J. Cotrona as Pedro Peña) are to Billy, but throughout most of the film director David Sanderson treats them as afterthoughts.

Perhaps this imbalance could be forgiven if it seemed like Sanderson and screenwriters Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan managed to effectively explore Billy’s character, but they fail at this task as well. The entire point of the Shazam character is that he’s a literal child in a man’s body – when we watch Levi’s red-suited superhero do something, it’s actually the 17-year old Billy doing it, with all of the raw emotions and underdeveloped sense of responsibility that would imply. But we never get to spend any significant time with that 17-year old – instead, any and all development happens while Billy is in his Shazamized form, and most of it is undercut by Levi’s sweaty, desperate delivery of bits that have a dismal batting average (a performance-style that now seems to inform how he behaves on social media, too). Whereas the first Shazam’s humor felt like it used multiple tools from the film comedy arsenal, Fury of the Gods relies on audiences thinking Levi and Glazer repeatedly stammering and trying to make their eyes pop out of their head is the height of joke-telling. Instead, it too often feels like something a teenager on YouTube would think is funny, or more accurately, what an adult would think a teenager on YouTube would think is funny. There’s no cadence or structure, just frenzied delivery.

These muddled attempts at humor have a trickle down effect to the villain plot, which is about how the Daughters of Atlas (a fine Helen Mirren, a refreshingly good Rachel Zegler, a career worst Lucy Liu), who hold a grudge against the Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) who gave Billy his powers in the first place, want to steal the powers of the Shazam family and recreate something called the Tree of Life on Earth to…well, I’m not exactly sure what these people (excuse me, gods) are trying to accomplish. For a movie that’s supposed to be funny, Fury of the Gods relies way too much on a surprisingly dense and dull mythology that washed over me entirely. While it’s true that people don’t go to these kinds of movies for the plot – all we need to know is that Philadelphia is in trouble and that Shazam and his siblings are the only ones who can save it – I should at least know why the bad guys are doing bad things. If I did, I might be able to forgive Sanderson and company for the Daughters’ dull design, the VFX team for the shoddy greenscreen work, and Warner Brothers for a mid-climax bit that’s one of the most shameless, eye-rolling examples of Hollywood product placement I’ve ever seen. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t describe the scene in detail, but let’s just say it involves a character using Skittles to help defeat a bunch of monsters, and literally whispering “taste the rainbow” as they do it. 

All movies are products, and modern superhero movies are no exception. But inserting the world’s most expensive Skittles commercial into the middle of what’s supposed to be a harrowing moment for our heroes feels like a pithy summation of why Fury of the Gods and so many of the other DCEU movies don’t work. It’s because they don’t feel like movies – rather, they feel like window-dressing for a larger corporate strategy designed, like all corporate strategies, to get its audience to buy more things. The MCU does a similar thing, but what makes it marginally more tolerable is that it’s trying to sell us on other Marvel movies (and TV shows and comic books). When it’s not hawking candy or department stores, the DCEU feels like it’s trying to sell you on itself. Not its movies, not its series, but the very idea of a DCEU that can compete with the MCU. And if you have to tell me over and over again that your joke is funny, or that your multi-platform entertainment universe is exciting, then it’s probably not.