Whoever says there's no such thing as bad publicity hasn't happened upon Gods of Egypt. This $140 million (€125 million) budgeted mega-flop was released in the US last February to notices that ranged from "rotten fruit pelting" to "howls of derisive laughter". Were they hoping we would forget?
Long before the film’s release, parent imprint Lionsgate and director Alex Proyas felt obliged to issue an apology, stating that they wished they had made more of an effort to diversify the cast, which notably includes Gerard Butler as the Glaswegian-accented Egyptian god Set, Lord of the Desert and Deep Fried Mars Bars.
We expect trouble when Set arrives at the coronation of his feckless nephew Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). We get trouble: Set crashes the party, kills two relatives, maims another, hijacks the crown and promptly hunts down any of the gods that might oppose his new tyrannical reign.
Horus, meanwhile, robbed of his super-eyes, hides out in the desert. Enter Bek (Brenton Thwaites) and Zaya (Courtney Eaton) two wholly uninteresting, loved-up mortals. If anything, Zaya becomes a little more charismatic after her death, a condition that Bek hopes Horus can rectify.
Aided and abetted by Hathor (Élodie Yung), Goddess of Needless Cleavage, and Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), God of Wasted Actors, Bek and Horus wander through the various set-pieces that make up the rest of the run-time.
This is not a great movie: the English-as-a-third-language banter makes the last two James Cameron movies sound like My Dinner with Andre. The rubbishy female characters are something less than surplus to requirements. The size difference between mortals and gods makes for discombobulating spectacle, and, oh yes, it's often boring. Whitewashing is among the least of this film's problems.
Still, any picture featuring Geoffrey Rush channelling King Lear as the patriarch god Ra while flying about in a spaceship can't be all bad. The artwork for Gods of Egypt – chariots flown by flocks of crows, fanged sandworms coming at ya – is wildly, promiscuously inventive. With a smidgeon more wit, it might have been this decade's Flash Gordon. Instead it's a yellow-pack HR Pufnstuf.
