Director: Louis Leterrier
Rating: 2 Stars
I didn't go into the theater with great expectations for this 2010 remake of a 1981 film of the same title. The plot concerns itself with the Greek legend of Perseus. The relation to the actual mythology is downright bad in terms of accuracy, but it's an action movie, so who really cares anyway? Also, I've seen the old one, but don't remember a lot of details, so I can't say how faithful it is to that source material... But, that's not that relevant as long as it stands on its own.
And I'd have to say it stands up okay. The movie was directed by French action-movie specialist, Louis Leterrier. Leterrier's other credits include The Transporter series,
Unleashed with Jet Li, and the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk
. His work here is really quite good. The action sequences are reasonably interesting and the special effects were a plus. It's simply a well-crafted action movie.That's about it, though. The film is poorly written with weak dialogue and humor that usually misses. Sam Worthington stars as Perseus. He recently struck gold with Avatar
but was nothing special here. I wouldn't say he was bad, and certainly had little to work with. Liam Neeson appears as Zeus and did fine with what he had to work with. The most sort of irritating performance came from Ralph Fiennes. He's the kind of actor who always seems to take himself too seriously (you have to be pretty pretentious to pronounce Ralph "rafe" I think). It's distracting, and his portrayal of Hades had my buds and I mocking him on the drive home.The movie was generally ho-hum, but wasn't a bad action movie. I didn't hate myself or want to do myself physical harm while watching it, and can think of a few people I know that I think would really like it. If you want to have a good time watching something with Medusa turning people to stone and the mythology-wrong kraken convincingly smashing the crap out of an ancient Greek city, then go see this. If you want anything else, stay away. (2 Stars)
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