2023 movies I've seen from best to worst

I liked the original quite a lot so I was looking forward to seeing how this went, and while it's not without merit, this isn't as good as it's predecessor. My main praise of this film is Jack Dylan Grazer as Freddy. This character absolutely steals the show thanks to JDG's natural charisma and the scenes that he's on screen are definitely the ones I enjoyed the most. The humour from the first film is still here and a lot of the jokes do land pretty well. Asher Angel returns as Billy Batson and he's a lot more likeable and less of the whiny brat he was in the previous film. However, this film did leave me a little underwhelmed in places, like the dynamics of Shazam/Billy and his family. In the previous film, something I liked was that these characters felt like kids with god-like powers, whereas now they feel more like personality vacuum gods who are just kids when the plot needs them to be. Also, like Mark Strong's Sivana in the previous film, I wasn't particularly keen on Lucy Liu and especially Helen Mirren as the villains here. They didn't feel all too well developed or motivated, it was more just that they were power hungry than anything else and, whilst I appreciate this is a more light-hearted film compared to others in this genre, the last act of this film did feel pretty goofy and stupid to the point where it took some enjoymemt away as it just felt a little absurd. As I say, there are some good things here, but I did prefer the original. C- (3.1/5)