Movie Nation

He was the Alpha, the Founder, “the originator, the ARCHITECT” of ‘rock’n roll.” Just ask him.

“I’m an NOT conceited,” the flamboyant, brash and hilarious Little Richard Penniman said to almost every interviewer who ever basked in his presence. “I am CONVINCED.”

Animated, outspoken, wild-eyed and bawdy, a maniac onstage and a scandal waiting to happen off, Penniman bridged the gap between racy “race music” and the raucous, embryonic sound that invented the idea of “teenagers.”

Ripped-off by record labels, too often downplayed in many a “History of Rock” account in book or film, does he finally get his due in Lisa Cortes’ new documentary, “Little Richard: I Am Everything?” Yes he does.

A tidal wave of all-star testimonials endorse the many ways he impacted the culture. The film samples the many times Richard himself made his case as that “originator and ARCHITECT” of the music form that lasted long enough to earn its own lavish Hall of Fame.

But historians, social scholars, gay icons and others also paint a picture of a seriously-conflicted figure whose Christian fundamentalism reared up repeatedly over the years.

The mercurial Richard left music, not far from his peak fame, to enroll in college to pursue his original vocation, preaching.

“I’m going to the Lord,” he said.

He came out of the closet, but would repudiate his sexuality and his music off and on in his later decades. The gay community side-eyed him every time he did, but people like Billy Porter appear here to express an understanding of the conflict that raged within a gay Black man of his era.

The veteran producer (“Precious”) and documentary director (“The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion” and “All In: The Fight for Democracy”) Cortes tracks a life that began in working poverty, one of twelve children of a washerwoman and preacher/juke joint owner and sometime bootlegger. Pretty much from birth, the boy was different.

“MY daddy said ‘I wanted SEVEN sons and you’re MESSING that up!'”

We see who influenced him as a performer, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Lloyd Price and Billy Wright, the chitlin’ circuit drag act performer whom Richard borrowed from most freely. And then we hear, from the horses’ mouths, the rockers who borrowed from Richard — David Bowie and those lads from Liverpool whom Richard dragged to Hamburg, Germany with him.

Paul McCartney watched his act, night after night, and emulated his “WOOOoooo” shrieks, and freely admits getting lessons on that. On tape, John Lennon remembers being “almost paralyzed with adoration” in his presence.

Richard launched a British tour with a show so over-the-top it started a riot. Even as fickle teen tastes changed, he did not and attracted adoring crowds to shows all through the ’60s.

Scores of TV interviews are sampled, capturing his smiling outrageousness in all its glory — self-adoring, comically snapping “Shut UP” at interviewers and studio audiences that might not be as quick to accept his “beauty” and his ego at face value.

We learn about his unlikely culture-shifting rise to fame from childhood neighbors and relatives, and his lasting influence from Nona Hendryx, Tom Jones, Nile Rodgers and even John Waters.

 “Little Richard’s mustache,” Baltimore enthusiast and gay filmmaker Waters gushes, “I wear TO THIS DAY in twisted tribute to him!”

In covering all the bases, the film’s energy can’t help but flag in the later acts. But Cortes has made an impressive music history that restores a “king” to his rightful place in rock royalty, one that acknowledges that everything outrageous about the music and the people who perform it, the stuff “your parents hated” about it, as Waters puts it, started with Little Richard Penniman.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Little Richard Penniman, Bo Didley, Nona Hendryx, Paul McCartney, Billy Porter, Tom Jones, Nile Rodgers and John Waters.

Credits: Directed by Lisa Cortes. A Magnolia/CNN Films release.

Running time: 1:38

Speaking directly to the camera, and perhaps to a support group, a counselor or a family member, Chama poetically muses are her situation and her need to “keep my s— together.”

She describes her dreams, her life, her family, and her struggles and ponders when “everything will fall apart” again. As together as she seems. As thoughtfully as she expresses her dreams, as beautiful as she is Chama can’t help but “wonder if you all hear me.”

“All the World is Sleeping” is a dreamy stroll around addiction, a film that makes much of the “seven women” whose stories inspired it, but which doesn’t actually get a handle on its subject and immerse us in this trap.

Built on a fine, empathetic performance by Melissa Barrera of “In the Heights” and the “Scream” franchise, it’s a movie of musings and close-ups, voice-over narrated memories of a troubled childhood, a family history of addiction, the loss of Chama’s ride-or-die friend, Toaster (Jackie Cruz, also superb) and her struggles to get her daughter back when “CPS” (Child Protective Services) intervenes, in New Mexico as it does every where else addicts are trying to raise children in between binges or fixes.

Chama is struggling, a single Latina mom whose man charmed her, impregnated her and left her, trying to find a job — she’s good with cars — and doting on her little girl (Adilynn Marie Menendez).

“I remember being her age,” Chama narrates of her daughter who is about nine. “It’s when I learned how to lie.”

We see just enough of her childhood to reckon with her quick-tempered alcoholic mother, and to wonder how sister Mari (Alexis B. Santiago) came out the other side a real adult, without addictions or an ill-planned pregnancy. Mari is in her life for the judgement.

Jorge Garcia plays the affable counselor at the halfway house where Chama winds up after her child’s birthday party pushes her over the edge.

We meet the usual collection of “types” who decorate such stories. Inspired by real people or not, these support group characters have become tropes in films like this — the regional Chili’s manager, who may be delusional, the fury with mother issues, the woman seven suicide attempts into “getting clean.”

The cast is quite good, and the locations — including a trip to the White Sands National Monument — ground the picture in a particular place and a corner of the culture.

Of course, as dreamlike as it is, “All the World is Sleeping” runs up against the same problems as Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar-nominated alcoholism drama, “To Leslie.” The ground is over-familiar. And as much as one wants to praise a performance and acknowledge the real life struggles with addiction that inspire such movies, finding something new, novel and powerful to say on the subject at this stage is damned near impossible.

This film is good, just not on a par with “Requiem for a Dream,” “Ben is Back,” “Smashed,” “Half Nelson,” and not even those jewels in the crown can touch “Leaving Las Vegas” for pathology and pathos.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jackie Cruz, Alexis B. Santiago, and Jorge Garcia

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ryan Lacen. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:50

This much is in obvious in watching, even if you’re not taking notes and reviewing “Shazam! Fury of the Gods.”

It’s a movie whose one joke was told in the original film, a decent sized hit for New Line/DC. And everything they add to the sequel just paints the picture further into a corner. It opens with nowhere to go, and that extends to the box office prospects as well.

Deadline.com is saying it could stumble out of the gate with just a $30 million take, which doesn’t really cover the cost of adding Dame Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu to the operation. While Deadline is historically off in predicting the matinee numbers of kid-friendly films, audience awareness/eagerness tracking suggests this thing isn’t headed in that direction.

It managed just under $12 million with Thursday previews and all-day Friday business. So anything over $35 million for an opening will be as close to a “win” as this redundant dog gets.

“Scream VI” is holding 40% of its opening weekend box office, and looks to add $18 to the pot, pushing it over the $75 million mark all-in by midnight Sunday.

“Creed III” is sticking around, taking in $15 or so.

“65” fell off steeply enough to qualify as a bomb, pulling in under $6 million this weekend. Adam Driver is not box office.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is still making just under $5 this weekend and should finish its run in the $220 million range a few weeks hence.

“Cocaine Bear” has sobered up a bit, just under $4 million by midnight Sunday. It’ll clear the $60 million mark next week, another feature in Elizabeth Banks’ cap.

“Jesus Revolution” has done pretty well, with another $3.5 pulling it close to $50 million, which it will clear by next weekend.

“Champions” bombed. Under $3 million this weekend, barely over $10 all in.

“Avatar: The Shape of Water” gets another weekend in the top ten (it should sit at $678 million domestic by midnight Sunday). “John Wick” may be the assassin who kills it off as a top ten picture.

And “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” enjoys a little more “only animated offering out there” weekend, with under $2 million still leaving it well short of $200 million in the US.

Weekend take updated via Box Office Pro? See below.

“In His Shadow” is a simplistic gangland parable about two half-brothers — one blind, the other a “monster” — who grew up and live in the Murets high rise projects on the outskirts of Paris.

Short and relatively brisk, it’s built on the unhappy upbringing that enveloped two sons thanks to their bullying and selfish Dad’s determination to bring home a second wife from the Old Country, whichever French African/Islamic colony (not specified) they trace their roots to.

The Ivory Coast singer Kaaris gives a ferocious performance as Ibrahim, the kid whose mother (Tatiana Rojo) was wronged by his father (Issaka Sawadogo) and grew up angry and criminal, at least partly due to that.

Adama (Alasasane Diong) grew up the son of the younger wife (Mareme N’Diaye), trapped in a stable but unhappy home with his sister Aïssata (Assa Sylla) and two feuding mothers.

Ibrahim turned to crime. Adama, caught up in the older half-sibling’s drama, was blinded in an accident related to the unhappy upbringing.

“In His Shadow” drops in on these lives just as things come to a head between these two, now adults. Ibrahim’s got control to the Murets projects, and parks his blind brother in his own apartment, which he turns into his “stash.”

And what happens to gangsters’ stashes? Rivals take it.

Adama becomes another member of the family at odds with and trapped with this “monster” in their lives. Aïssata cannot have a boyfriend (Carl Malapa), the mothers neighbors and businessmen can get no peace. The police are outnumbered.

And then their father dies, something also linked to Ibrahim’s activities. Adama must take his father’s lifelong advice to heart if he’s going to free them from this situation.

“Embrace your weakness,” Dad counseled (in French, or dubbed into English). “Don’t fight it. Look to make it your strength.”

Everything but that “look” instruction seems practical for the blind son with heightened hearing and other senses compensating for his “weakness.”

“Simplistic” comes in via the movie’s contrivances and plot conveniences, with the weapons of revenge dropped into our hero’s lap, along with a remedy for his “weakness.”

The action beats are pro forma, as are the way stations of this plot.

But Kaaris makes for a hulking fearsome heavy, a brute who will beat his own kin down or even to death if he sees the need. He alone is not worth checking this film.

There are many superior recent French thrillers available, some of them on Netflix, and most of them set in this or that housing project, just like the one glanced-over here. Those are worth watching. “In His Shadow” isn’t worth your time.

Rating: TV-MA, animal harm, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Alassane Diong, Kaaris, Assa Sylla, Carl Malapa, Tatiana Rojo, Mareme N’Diaye and Issaka Sawadogo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marc Fouchard. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Tying a video Russian-born video game’s sale to the West to the fall of the U.S.S.R. may be a bit of a reach. But “Tetris,” the thoroughly engrossing new film about that, lacks nothing for ambition.

But “Tetris” becomes an equal parts playful and suspenseful yarn in the hands of the director of “Filth” and “Stan & Ollie,” Jon S. Baird.

Computer programmers and commissars, Japanese hardware icons and a British media baron all take the stage in the story about the unlikely path the Gameboy-popular building-blocks game took from Russian inventor to Nintendo blockbuster.

Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, the Dutch-born, New York-raised, Tokyo-based game builder whose Bullet Proof Software gamble on a digital version of the Asian game “Go” is all but forgotten the moment he sees Tetris demonstrated at the booth next to his at the ’88 Vegas Consumer Electronics Show.

He wants rights, but most are already sold. Not in Japan, though, and that’s where he’s based. His pursuit of PC and arcade rights to Tetris and to get Nintendo to commit to “partnering” for it are how this journey down the rabbit hole begins.

There’s this Hungarian/British tech businessman Robert Stein (Toby Jones, in rare form) who hunts for games in the U.S.S.R., and who discovers one that has been shared by everybody who has a computer there. He’s got the rights to it, and with the backing of Soviet leader Gorbachev’s multi-media billionaire “friend,” Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam, vocally, temperamentally and prosthetically perfect), he figures the world is his oyster.

Japanese rights? Sure. Go ahead.

But Rogers’ mesmerizing sales pitch to Nintendo’s founder, Hiroshi Yamauchi (Togo Igawa), all about how “partners are what make us great,” because that’s “why Mario (Super Mario Brothers) has Luigi,” may all be for naught.

The Russians have little idea of what’s become of this game, what contracts have been signed, what’s valid and how to cope with these damned eager beaver Western and Far Eastern capitalists. The inventor of the game, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov)? He’s been cut out of the conversation altogether.

As it’s the very late ’80s, the U.S.S.R. is just entering its death spiral, with some officials dogmatically toeing the Communist Party all-for-the-state line and ready to drive a bargain, and others looking for bribes because the End if Nigh, why not fly there — illegally — and try to negotiate in-person with people who have spent decades making Westerners they don’t like disappear?

Egerton manages a fine American accent and even tosses Japanese in as we see what this all-or-nothing gamble is doing to his wife (Ayane), family and Tokyo home life. He’s perfectly cast as a born salesman with the pluck to risk hearing direct threats from assorted Russians and yet persist. Rogers is that desperate.

“I am not going home without a deal.”

The Soviet/Russian skullduggery sequences, with game-inventor Pajitnov straining to keep his head down lest he lose it, are menacing and maddening. Each concerned party is being played off against the rest by mistrustful Russians who are the least trustworthy of all.

Baird inserts digital block-ish Gameboy-styled graphics into random scenes — a building about to be visited, a car chase — to playful effect. The score has “bleeps” and “beeps” tucked into it in between Russian-language versions of the pop radio hits of the day — “Heart of Glass” among them.

The portrayal of the Maxwells — by Allan and Anthony Boyle as the prickly and insecure heir taking charge of this negotiation, Kevin Maxwell — are just delicious. We may know what’s coming, remembering the downfall of the Hungarian-born British media baron and just-as-right-wing rival to Rupert Murdoch. But we can savor it as his company’s digital game division scrambles to score a big win even as the cash has run out.

“Tetris” suffers somewhat from a complicated plot rendered in broad strokes and a story told kind of piecemeal. The opening act is Rogers explaining how Tetris is about to be the next big thing and how negotiations are going so far to a skeptical banker (Nicky Yune). That framing device falls by the wayside as trips are taken, deals are struck and then reneged on, seemingly by everyone but Rogers.

Screenwriter Noah Pink, who wrote the docu-drama series “Genius” for National Geographic, wrestles with a complex and convoluted story and manages to make the murk as clear as it probably can be made. It was always going to be hard to follow all this, and how it ties in to the Fall of Berlin Wall.

But the players, the stakes and the milieu make “Tetris” well worth your time, especially for anyone nostalgic for all the time we wasted on this simple yet elementally addicting game.

Rating: R, beatings, profanity

Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Ayane, Nicky Yune, Toby Jones, Olag Stefan, Toyo Nagawa, Anthony Boyle and Roger Allam

Credits: Directed by Jon S. Baird, scripted by Noah Pink. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:58

Shazad Latif, Sajal Ally, Shabana Azmil and Emma Thompson also star in this May 5 release.

But about that title…

“Rimini” is a darkly-comic Austrian tale of a Lounge Singer in Winter, figuratively and literally.

This Ulrich Seidl film is set in the Italian resort city in the off-season, when the snow blows and the water park is closed. That’s when the penny-pinching German and Austrian seniors make the trek South to stay in discounted resorts, to play the slots and listen to the aging pop crooner Richie Bravo sing Italian love ballads in German.

Yes, every single thing about that is amusingly messed-up. The writer-director of the ironically titled “Paradise” trilogy is giving us a “Broadway Danny Rose” set in a forlorn, seen-better-days “Atlantic City,” here on the Adriatic Coast.

Seidl’s frequent alter ego Michael Thomas plays Richie, a glad-handing, dyed-blond, Van Dyked and biker-burly “star” whose voice has aged into a light baritone.

We meet him as he shows up at the Austrian house he grew up in, drinking, horsing around and reminiscing with his brother (George Freedrich). He’s come to bury their mother. And that means they must fetch their aged, demented father from the nursing him and hope he doesn’t break into Austrian marching songs from WWII during the almost-empty service.

That deadpan get-away isn’t exactly a vacation from Riche’s real life. But as Richie lives in a vacation Mecca, that’s poetic justice. He strides along the snowy boardwalks in his snakeskin boots and elkskin coat, muttering at the homeless Middle Eastern refugees he sees everywhere.

He gets dolled-up for his stage aact, singing along to a backing track for busloads of tourists. He works the crowd after shows, drinks with the customers and collects a pittance for his labor, it being the off-season. And he answers his always-ringing phone. Richie is a man in demand. The ageing crooner’s ageing fans have needs. He’s a singer and sex worker.

“Angela, my darling! How could I forget!” (in German and sometimes Italian with English subtitles). He’ll be right over.

The singing is credibly corny, the sex scenes drily comical. “Ageing gracefully” doesn’t fit into the picture when your fan/”client” has her bedridden, even-older mother not-really-asleep in the next room as you slake her um, thirst.

But Richie’s got a nice townhouse, filled with costumes and mementos. He’s not really “living the dream,” but he is managing to live the delusion. We almost feel sorry for him, but not quite

Then his angry, long-estranged daughter Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher) arrives, stalks him and eventually reintroduces herself to the old creep who came onto her after his show the night before. She’s come of age, and she wants all the child support — and NOTHING else — that he owes her.

A guilt-ridden Richie has to scrape together cash for a raging fury who won’t agree to just sit down and talk and reconnect. Her tone and the silent Arabic boyfriend who accompanies her to their meet-ups just reinforce the feeling that this is a shakedown.

It’s probably what Richie deserves, but man, does this cramp his style. He’s got to sell jewelry, beg borrow and steal, and all of that could give a sex worker performance anxiety in the bargain.

Seidl has a droll, straightforward way with this material. As with his name-making “Paradise” films of a dozen years ago, he’s not content to let a single film make his points about personalities, Austrian life and the Austrian psyche in a single movie. He’s made a follow-up film, “Sparta,” focusing on Richie’s brother’s lot in life.

The inclusion of the aged, tuned-out father (Hans-Michael Rehberg, who died after filming his scenes) suggests a sort of Austrian guilt as subtext. Dad is dying alone, miserable and trapped. The generation folks like this raised has its reasons for keeping its distance. But they aren’t happy or guilt-free, either.

Thomas’s engagingly repellant, larger-than-life turn as Richie hints at the way Hollywood could cast and remake this. Because we all know how much the burly and vain Russell Crowe loves to sing.

But why wait? “Rimini” gives us the unadulterated melancholy of living your worst life in the best place you could hope, only not at the time of year anyone would prefer.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Michael Thomas, Tessa Göttlicher, Georg Friedrich and Hans-Michael Rehberg

Credits: Directed by Ulrich Seidl, scripted by Ulrich Seidl and Veronika Franz A Big World Pictures release.

Running time: 1:55

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” has a badass star…and Chris Pine (Sorry, nobody puts Michelle Rodriguez in a bad-ass back seat).

And it opens next week.

The producers pulling together a long-expected sequel to “Twister” would be wise to take a look at “Supercell” before shooting starts. It’s a “Twister” sequel in everything but name.

A kid grows up in Florida, where his blonde, ex-storm scientist mother moved him after his famous storm-chasing died in the line of duty years before? The teen runs off to Texas where an uncle now tracks tornadoes and drives paying customers around for a bullying, grizzled and storm-obsessed tour operator?

That would have been an excellent plot to build “Twisters,” slated for release in 2024, around. The filmmakers of “Supercell” think so, too. The teen does a Google search for his dad, and one of the names he scrolls past is Bill Paxton, the late star of that 1996 hit.

“Supercell” is the last or next to last film Anne Heche made before she died. Its “bullying, grizzled and storm-obsessed tour operator” is played by Alec Baldwin, who makes lines like “Storm chasing is 90% driving and 10% witnessing the Creator’s Wrath” work.

Truth be told, a lot of this debut feature by director/co-writer Herbert James Winterstern works. Consider its structure and shooting strategy, capturing the stark beauty of the great, flat middle of America’s Tornado Alley, that Texas to North Dakota belt that this Montana-based production depicts. Listen for the French horns in the emotional moments of the Corey Wallace score.

This guy isn’t fooling around. He’s doing Spielberg, a “Close Encounters/E.T.” take on storm chasing. Hey, if you’re gonna steal…

A prologue that avoids showing adult faces lets us see a little boy learning weather basics as he’s eyeballing storms from his dad, and caution from his mother. The kid is handed Dad’s stethoscope and told that “Mom is inventing something” that will let the world “hear” storms about to turn tornadic from far enough off to save lives.

Close-ups of hands grabbing radios or dial cell phones, a “Brody Storm Labs” truck peels out, a child walks up to a Spielbergian window to glimpse an awesome “Close Encounter” in the making and a tragedy, mostly off-camera, is heard on shortwave radio and seen in the unanswered cell phone in an overturned truck.

That seven minute prologue is so beautifully handled it should give Winterstern a dandy sizzle reel to show folks when he’s trying to line up work, even if not a lot of people see “Supercell.”

Here’s what you’ll miss if you don’t.

Daniel Diemer of TV’s “The Midnight Club” is Will Brody, son of the “legendary” storm chaser, a teen helping his mom clean houses in BFE, Florida because that’s where she moved them and that’s what she does after the trauma of losing her husband and two Oklahoma University grad students did to her.

Will’s grown up not knowing his dad, and obsessed with storms and the DIY gear his parents invented to “listen” to them. That gadget gets him in trouble when he keeps it in a backpack at school. The principal and the cops thought it was a bomb.

When he bolts out a window to climb on the roof in “the lightning capital of America” (Florida) to use it, they get it. Longtime rich girl crush Hunter (Jordan Kristine Seamón), the one giving him driving lessons in her vintage Mustang, is further smitten.

Dad’s old journal arriving in the mail has Will hitchhiking to Texas, just showing up at Uncle Roy’s (Skeet Ulrich) door. That’s how he falls in with “Brody Storm Chasers,” a company named for his uncle and his late father but owned by gonzo, low-rent capitalist Zane (Baldwin).

When Mom finds out, she’s “There’s no place safe in that entire TIME zone this time of year” pissed. But since her truck’s broke, she’ll have to ride share to Texas with Danger Boy-loving Hunter.

They’d better hurry. It’s that time of year.

The state of the art in digital effects is in a different universe than the one “Twister” was filmed in, so much so that the late Ms. Heche was able to film two convincing and perfectly watchable tornado movies in the last couple of years of her life — this one and the more tense and perilous “13 Minutes.”

Nobody is going to call “Supercell” a great film. There’s a blown line or two, attempts at humor seem strained, more suspense was needed as the Big Storm payoffs arrive too-abruptly. Characters are thinly-developed and its corny enough to be predictable, even though there aren’t really enough tornado tales on film that one could call it a genre.

But it is well-thought-out, beautifully shot by Andrew Jeric (“Sightless”) and the actors, playing stock “types,” add value with performances that land, even when characters are doing one of the “three things” you should never risk in a tornado, even as the sentimental script is skipping past a teenager’s questions about the afterlife so that we can get to a scene where today’s storm chasers slow-clap the son of their late idol.

It isn’t “Twisters.” But if the makers of that sequel have the good sense to sample everything else that’s been done on the subject recently, it is a film that sets the bar for them. A little script-doctoring, a few family photos of the late Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman and the presence of Oscar-winner Helen Hunt and you’ve got yourself the outline, the tone and the look of a movie almost sure to be a hit.

Rating: PG-13 (Profanity, some peril, smoking)

Cast: Daniel Diemer, Anne Heche, Jordan Kristine Seamón, Skeet Ulrich and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by Herbert James Winterstern, scripted by Herbert James Winterstern and Anna Elizbeth James. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:40

“Shazam: Fury of the Gods” stumbles down the narrow line between “kid-friendly” and “just plain juvenile.” As the “Shazam” movies are engineered for a younger audience, Janie and Johnny’s first comic book movie, that isn’t a blanket condemnation.

It rises to cute, every now and then. The effects are decent and a few of the one-liners land. The tone is light throughout. And there’s a grand product placement gag.

The guest stars include an Oscar winner (Helen Mirren) and an actress who never lets us see “What did my agent get me into?” But we feel it in Lucy Liu’s sometimes uncomfortable turn as an armor-clad warrior required to ride a CGI driftwood dragon through the skies and down the Streets of Philadelphia.

While “Fury of the Gods” shares tropes and story elements with most other comic book movies, there’s a dash of cribbed Harry Potter magic dust sprinkled in too-obvious borrowings, and a narrative barely worthy of that label. Even by comic book movie standards, this is something of a stiff.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is still living with his foster “fam,” including five kids he shared super powers with when a wizard (Djimon Hounsou) passed them on to him. They’re teenagers who transform into beefy super heroes played by Zachary Levi, Grace Caroline Currey, Adam Brody, Meagan Good, Ross Butler, and D.J. Cotrona when they say “Shazam!”

But as they fight crime and try to save folks from a crumbling bridge, for instance, not everything goes to plan. “Philly Fiascos” is not the greatest name for a gang of super friends who team up, “All, or none,” on every problem they face.

But at home, they’re just kids. And at school, nebbishy, crutch-using Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) is still bullied.

A new threat has come their way. The magical wooden staff used to bestow their powers on them was broken after using, and has turned up in a Greek museum. That’s where two armed warrior princesses, Daughters of Atlas (Mirren and Liu) find it, steal it and set out to track down the kids who have the powers it conveyed to them.

That cute new girl at school (Rachel Zegler) taking the time to talk to the annoying Freddy? You know she’s too good to be true.

At least the wizard they once conferred with (Hounsou) didn’t turn to dust after all.

“Aren’t you dead-ass dead?”

That’s the caliber of the jokes here — juvenile, a little swearing teenaged.

Shazam’s hero’s journey is to face Hespera (Mirren) and his own feelings of inadequacy and immaturity.

“You play the part of a man, but you do not play it well.”

Everyone is tested, and the answer is always going to be working as a “fam” and understanding that “The most powerful thing in you, is YOU.”

Levi is still committed to the part and gives the character a big kid vibe, and that spreads among the regulars in the cast, even the ones with little to do in this sequel.

“Annabelle: Creation” director David F. Sandberg (look for her as a prop) keeps the fights and monsters visually coherent and easy enough to follow.

But the villains are generally bland, everything between the fights is dull and trips into a “Hogwarts as Imagined by Maurice Escher” kiddie superhero “lair” add almost nothing.

I’m inclined to cut comic book films made expressly for kids a little slack, but if the new head of the DC comic book film universe isn’t endorsing this corner of their empire, despite cross-over cameos in the finale and after-credits teasers, you can see why.

They may have wrung everything out of “Shazam” in just one movie. And this is just that movie’s inferior sequel.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, and language

Cast: Zachary Levi, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, Rachel Zegler, Meagan Good, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Caroline Currey, Asher Angel, Adam Brody, Diedrich Bader, and Djimon Hounsou

Credits: Directed by David F. Sandberg, scripted by Henry Gayden, Chris Morgan and Bill Parker. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:10