The first Shazam movie from 2019 was praised for its lighter, brighter worldview, its Gen-Z brio and for being generally unencumbered by the portentous and spurious gloom of earlier DC films. This is true of this sequel too, only it’s hard not to notice that it could simply be fitting into another boilerplate model (there’s a cheeky gag about The Avengers). A group of superheroes, all with cartoony character traits and a sprinkling of funny lines, wind up battling an intergalactic invasive menace, culminating in the usual spectacular but unserious CGI urban apocalypse, with people saying things like: “This ends tonight!”
Billy Batson, played by Asher Angel, is the teen kid in Philadelphia living with foster parents and foster siblings, who with the cry of “Shazam!” has the ability to transform himself into a clean-cut but anxious superhero whose impostor syndrome worries are not helped by the fact that he often makes an awful mess of crime-fighting. He is played by Zachary Levi with the chiselled look of Mad Men’s Don Draper. With him is disabled friend Freddy Freeman, played by Jack Dylan Grazer, who like all the kids has a superhero alter ego: his is smirkingly self-aware Captain Everypower (Adam Brody). Interestingly, it is Freddy who appears almost always as his vulnerable non-superhero teen self and so upstages Billy/Shazam.
