I kind of enjoyed the original movie: it was silly but fun (review).

This movie leans even harder than the original into the teen awkwardness - trying to milk laughs both from our adopted family's internal dynamics and problems at school and from adult superheroes who are mentally teens saying silly things. The divergence between the behaviour of Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and Shazam (Zachary Levi) - who are supposed to be the same person - has diverged even further: Billy is a kind of quiet, fairly sensible 17 year old, but when he becomes Shazam, he's a motor-mouthed 12 year old (in Levi's body). With the rest of the Shazam family, they try to make their behaviour as "adult" superheroes mirror their child-state behaviour, but the Levi-Angel split that was visible in the first movie has been made even more apparent in this movie. Which doesn't really make sense: the point of the humour seemed to be that we have adult-looking superheroes who act their actual mental age ... but "Shazam" is actually saner and quieter as a teenager?

Our antagonists this time are Helen Mirren (slumming, but maybe it sounded fun to play a god) and Lucy Liu, both playing daughters of the Titan Atlas. They're out to reclaim their powers - which, it turns out, the Shazam family are powered by. Not that the two goddesses are short on powers to start with. There's a huge dragon, there are monsters, there's an intelligent pen that writes them notes, there are unicorns. And there are product placements: a stinking massive one for Skittles, but it certainly wasn't the only one - we also get chips (I forget which kind) and "The Fast and the Furious" franchise. And at the end, Gal Gadot/Wonder Woman puts in a seriously deus ex machina cameo - to solve the problems the writers couldn't figure out how to handle otherwise (that's what "deus ex machina" is for, right?).