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A fun follow-up that has a strong emotional core, but trio of villains with vaguely-defined powers and motivations hamper the much of the film. The movie tries to balance out the time spent between the six members of the Shazam family in both their human forms and their super-powered forms. They do a decent job, leaning more towards the heroic versions of the characters. While Billy Batson and Freddie Freeman were the leads of the first film, here Freddy is once again human most of the story, but Billy appears in his Shazam form almost the whole time. The plot is solid, but the villains’ masterplan is too poorly-defined until late in the film, which makes it hard to understand the stakes. Having three bad guys doesn’t really help either. Their motivations are all over the place, their abilities aren’t explained very well and having multiple villains doesn’t even really help even out the odds and give all the super-heroes more to fight. The finale could’ve been strong, but I never really bought that they were going to go the route they were building towards. The effects were decent, and there was a lot of obvious CG, but the character designs were well done and kind of popped when on screen. There’s a mid-credit scene they could have led to something cool, but with the DCEU reboot on the horizon, it probably doesn’t matter. The end-credit scene is more stand-alone, but not really worth sticking around for.
***1/2 out of *****