Movie Review - ‘Wrath of the Titans’

By Bob Garver

“Wrath of the Titans” is an excel­lent rea­son why audi­ences shouldn’t throw money at bad movies. I’m not even talk­ing about this film, which is doing deservedly poorly against the sec­ond week of “The Hunger Games”. I’m talk­ing about “Clash of the Titans”, which spent two weeks at #1 back in 2010, ulti­mately mak­ing over $160 mil­lion domes­ti­cally. In its first week­end alone it made over $60 mil­lion, owing in no small part to that week­end being Easter and the film get­ting to take advan­tage of hol­i­day crowds. The film was lousy and for­get­table, but it made money. It thereby jus­ti­fied this sequel, which is lousy and for­get­table and won’t make money.

The film adds more branches to the twisted fam­ily tree of the first film. We already know the demigod Perseus (Sam Wor­thing­ton), now com­mit­ted to liv­ing the life of a mor­tal. His father Zeus (Liam Nee­son) is the most pow­er­ful of the gods, his uncle Hades (Ralph Fiennes) is an evil god. This film intro­duces Perseus’s mor­tal son Helius (John Bell), his war-god brother Ares (Edgar Ramirez) who you can tell is a bad guy the sec­ond you lay eyes on him, and his grand­fa­ther Kro­nos (CGI smoke), a really evil god who was impris­oned when the good gods took over. Hades and Ares scheme to release Kro­nos and let him do all sorts of no good to the world.

Tasked with sav­ing the world if only for his son, Perseus goes on a quest to res­cue Zeus, who has been impris­oned by Ares and Hades. A dying Posei­don (Danny Hus­ton) directs him to his demigod son Agenor (Toby Kebbell), who serves as the annoy­ing side­kick for the rest of the movie. He meets up with Queen Androm­eda (Rosamund Pike, replac­ing Gemma Arter­ton from the orig­i­nal) and together they go to see Hep­haes­tus (Bill Nighy), a retired weapons maker who can get them into the labyrinth where Zeus is being held.

The labyrinth is a wasted oppor­tu­nity. I like the idea to char­ac­ters hav­ing to nav­i­gate through a maze and solv­ing puz­zles and over­com­ing obsta­cles. We get a few slid­ing walls that the char­ac­ters man­age to squeeze by with ease. Perseus also does bat­tle with a Mino­taur, a sequence that it so quick and incon­se­quen­tial that the crea­ture is never even iden­ti­fied as a Mino­taur. But come on, what other crea­ture is going to be hang­ing out in a labyrinth?

The rest of the movie is spent try­ing to stop Ares and Kro­nos. I’m try­ing to think of any­thing else of inter­est that hap­pens. Hades’s loy­al­ties waver, Ares makes the stu­pid vil­lain mis­take of get­ting into a fair fight with Perseus, and Perseus and Androm­eda fall in love, though you prob­a­bly don’t need me to tell you that. One thing I did like is the sol­diers that Kro­nos sends out. They’re basi­cally con­joined twins with six limbs. I wouldn’t want to end up on the wrong side of one of those. I’ll take my chances with Grandpa the Smoke Monster.

It’s sad that the anony­mous hench­men are the only pos­i­tive thing I can say about “Wrath of the Titans”. Then again a lot about the movie is sad; the story, the spe­cial effects (you can tell exactly which patches of screen are about to be filled with CGI), its inevitable box office per­for­mance, and the fact that it exists. Though I wasn’t happy with “The Hunger Games” last week, I am grate­ful that it is stomp­ing the “Titans” fran­chise into what I hope is sub­mis­sion. If we can some­how get it to squash the entire “Trans­form­ers” uni­verse we’ll be in good shape.

One and a Half Stars out of Five

“Wrath of the Titans” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of fan­tasy vio­lence and action. Its run­ning time is 99 minutes.

Posted by Bob Garver on Apr 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.