Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Now, I could have seen Wrath of the Titans at a press screening earlier this week, but why would I want to save $10 watching a sequel to a poor remake of a childhood favorite? Truth be told, the press screening slipped my mind. My mom recently got laid off and I’ve been spending almost every bit of free time this last week helping her pick up the pieces and keep her from losing her house.
But turn that frown upside down, the sad part of this review is over… kinda. Because I still paid $10 to watch a midnight of Wrath of the Titans, but at least I got to watch it in 2D.
Right up front, I enjoyed this movie more than the first film… and by that I mean the remake, not the first first film… Okay, we need to set up some ground rules. Clash of the Titans is the 1981 movie with Ray Harryhausen stop motion and the remake we’ll just call Perseus Grumbles For 106 Minutes (Perseus Grumbles for short).
Perseus Grumbles wasn’t horrible, it was just limp. Sam Worthington was about as one-note as you could get, but it’s not like Harry Hamlin was the most charismatic dude, either.
I’m afraid to report that the script is about as strong as Perseus Grumbles, but there’s a key difference. Worthington seems to be enjoying himself a little bit and they let him run wild with his regular accent, so he’s not trapped in that bland neutral drawl he had before. So, sure there’s a whole lot of dialogue like, “Remember what you told your wife as she was on her death bed? That your son would never hold a sword…” Of course he’d know that. He was there! We weren’t, though, so we need that bit of character development. You know, lazy writing that was about a draft or three away from being woven into the narrative a little less conspicuously.
Overlooking all that, director Jonathan Liebesman keeps the pace up and throws a ton of monsters at us, including a very well designed two-headed fire breathing bat-lion creature that has a venomous snake for a tail. When you pair that pace with Worthington having a little bit of fun you automatically get a better film than Perseus Grumbles.
They also realized they had some great actors playing Gods and remembered that people might want to go to a movie like this to watch Liam Neeson Zeus lightning the shit out of some bad guys.
They still could have used more of that stuff (hell, I would have been happy if they ignored Perseus and the humans entirely and just told the tale of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades having to imprison their asshole daddy, Kronos), but they get an A for effort for making the Gods a really massive part of the story. Danny Huston actually gets to speak dialogue this time out! On camera!
I’m being a little flippant, but I will say there’s a really nice father/son threat woven through this story as Perseus comes to terms with his father and how that informs his relationship with his own son. It’s nothing new, but while some of the dialogue is repeated and underlined for the absolute lowest of IQs that could wander into the theater there was some effort taken by the writers to massage the film’s themes.
More than anything, though, I sat through this movie hoping it makes a shit ton of money so some studio somewhere does a nice $75m-$100m God of War film. I think I had that same thought with the first film, but there’s a ton of God of War imagery here, including an epic fire and lava bad guy. There’s a great hardcore R-rated fun action flick to be had in this universe and I think it’d take a known and popular property to actually get an exec to nut up and give the greenlight.
I got sidetracked a bit, didn’t I? Where was I? Oh, yeah… Wrath of the Titans is better than Perseus Grumbles, but not half the adventure fun of even the worst Harryhausen fantasy film. By today’s standards, the CG is pretty strong, the creature design is well-thought out and the themes of the film are tried and true, but work. A more interesting Gods-centered movie is hinted at, but the movie we get is fine enough for matinee prices. Oh, and Bubo shows up again and again is the butt of the joke. I was really hoping they’d do something heroic with him just to throw us off, but alas… maybe they’re saving that for Return of the Titans.
That about sums it up.
Now I can get back to my SXSW catch-up, a big set visit piece that’s hitting next week (can’t say what, but I will say it rhymes with Shmee Ashmengers), some interviews and, God willing, my next Hobbit report. Stay tuned!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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