Directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Starring Sam Worthington, Bill Nighy, Rosamund Pike, Édgar Ramírez, Danny Huston, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson 12A cert, general release, 99 min
RISE, RISE, oh heroic reader, and celebrate the ceremony of noise that is Wrath of the Titans. Brave Warner Bros have made the film they were trying to make with Clash of the Titans.
Rather than impose the 3D in post-production, the cinema Gods have utilised a pure version of that antic magic. The film has something like a story. A better class of hoity-toity actor has been drafted in to play the bearded deities. Wrath offers the best we could have hoped for from a disinterment of a 1980s epic nobody much liked in the first place.
All of which is a way of saying that the new film is just about endurable. You won’t want to watch it again. But you won’t feel like scratching your eyes out while sitting through your first viewing.
What we have here is a pseudo-classical remake of Shane. Following the catastrophic events in Clash of the Titans, Perseus (Sam Worthington) is making his way as a humble fisherman. When he’s not gazing contentedly at computer-generated horizons, the recovering demigod plays with his son and looks forward to life lived far from bull-headed chimeras in leather skirts.
The opening shots promise the sort of quiet, rural drama that wins prizes at Belgian film festivals. But what’s this? It’s Liam Neeson wearing George Bernard Shaw’s loDONALD CLARKEger beard. He’s playing Zeus – father to the happy fisher – and he’s got some bad news. Various slumming RSC actors have decided to start a war in the underworld. Before too long the skies are alive with giant lizards.
We do not have space to list the film’s abundant absurdities. The decision to retain the actors’ natural accents makes a hilarious Babel of the ancient world: Zeus is from Ballymena; Perseus is from Perth; Hades is from whichever suburb of Poshington-on-the-Snoot gave us Ralph Fiennes. Rosamund Pike does her best as the savage Andromeda, but one can’t help but think one is watching Xena: Warrior Princess rewritten by Mrs Gaskell.
Still, Jonathan Liebesman, director of Battle Los Angeles, delivers enough bangs to keep even the sleepiest viewer awake. It could have been much worse.
