CLASH OF THE TITANS

Dir. Louis Leterrier US 2010

So I didn't intend to start this blog off on a negative note, but this was the first movie I saw in theatres in over a month and it managed to sneak right under my already middling expectations and completely suck ass.

Before going any further, I will come out and say that I have never seen the 1981 version of Clash Of The Titans. I had planned on it before seeing the new one and it was on Netflix Instant Watch and everything, but I just didn't get to it. So I was going into this with no means or intention to compare it to the original version. At most, I was hoping to see a kick-ass, live action version of God of War. That would be cool, right? Those games look fun.

It was exactly like that. Except without the violence or nudity or whatever makes those games interesting on any level. I almost fell asleep twice during this movie. That alone should be damning enough. But there's so much more.

Let's start with Sam Worthington, the star of this movie and one of its biggest problems. Now, I don't hate Sam Worthington. He fulfills most of the requirements necessary to make an effective action star (there aren't that many). Handsome, glowers effectively, looks believeable holding a sword or gun on a poster, plus, he's got the foreign accent* However, this is the third movie I've seen him star in (following Terminator: Salvation and Avatar) in which he is a giant black hole of mediocrity, collapsing any interest or sympathy that may exist in his characters into a tiny, indistinguishable singularity. He's like a butch, Austrailian clone of Orlando Bloom. In fact, the most interesting role I've seen him in was as a supporting character (the cynical asshole) in this suprisingly decent Austrailian crocodile flick called Rogue. But I digress.

Now, I get that Perseus isn't the most original of protagonists. He's a minimally developed underdog on a generic revenge quest, not too far removed from Maximus in Gladiator. But where Russell Crowe was able to give Maximus depth and pathos, Worthington pretty much sleep walks through the role, acting angry when you'd expect him to be angry, resolved when you'd expect him to be resolved and angst-ridden whenever possible. Oh and he was kind of sarcastically funny once. Possibly twice. And again, the character is pretty poorly written, coming off as a whiny bitch who refuses to use his fairly nebulous but presumably kick ass demigod powers because it will make him just like the gods he so despises (original I know). But I've seen actors do more with less and considering this is the third megabudget movie this guy has headlined in less than a year, I'd have expected him to display some kind of personality by now. Even Keanu Reeves is kind of fascinating in his wooden-ness.

As I mentioned, the script doesn't exactly pull its weight here, cramming in nearly two dozen supporting characters and spending about 95% of its time focused on the boring protagonist. The actors range from criminially wasted (Danny Huston has exactly one fucking line as Poseidon and Polly Walker appears in one scene playing a paper thin version of her brilliant Atia character from HBO's Rome) to desperately trying to find something worthwhile in the script. Standouts include Pete Postlethwaite (he should totally play Aeron Damphair in Game of Thrones) as Perseus' adopted father, who dies in the first ten minutes, and Mads Mikkelsen (the bad guy from Casino Royale) the hardass leader of the soldiers who has at least three laughably repetitive conversations with Perseus about how they're all totally fucked unless he uses his powers to make their quest a little easier. Which he doesn't. Dick.

Female characters are expected to suffer in action movies, but this movie does it twice in the form of Io (Gemma Arterton from Quantum of Solace) and Andromeda (the chick with electric powers from Angel). Io shows up out of nowhere with a creepy sob story about being cursed with immortality and spying on Perseus his entire life, and follows them on their quest in order to provide exposition whenever necessary and be a sexless PG-13 love interest. Andromeda is ostensibly a plot device (they need to finish their quest or else she'll be sacrified), but one the audience has no investment in at all. And since Perseus is A) doing this all for revenge and B) already has a love interest, he really has no stake in saving her except, I guess, it's the right thing to do or something.

Also, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes are Zeus and Hades respectively, but the former spends the entire movie lording over an irritatingly overlit throne room and the latter appears mostly in the form of a cloudy of blurry, poorly rendered CG harpies. Bullshit.

The Kraken, apparently the money shot of the movie, appears for about 15 seconds more than it does in the trailer, where everything cool about it was given away anyway. Double bullshit.

As much as the script is a paint-by-numbers piece of shit (four screenwriters are credited, so you know that there were actually about ten), the blame for this, as always, mostly rests on the director. Louis Leterrier showed some serious promise with The Incredible Hulk, which captured the essence of an easily misrepresented character with clever action scenes, a clear narrative and well-utilized CGI. Clash Of The Titans fails on all of those levels and more. This causes me to cast serious doubts on Leterrier as one of the possible directors of the Avengers movie.

As a final note, I saw the movie in 2-D after reading both Quint's review on Aint It Cool News and the New York Times review, both of which describle the 3-D version as, and I'm parapharsing, a total clusterfuck. For more info on why 3-D doesn't work on everything, check out their reviews.

*All major action stars have foreign accents (Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Chan) or bizarre American inflections (Stallone, Reeves). The only exception is Bruce Willis.