What's dreadful about Clash of the Titans isn't the buffet table approach to myths and legends, the unfortunate script, the negligible use of 3D, or what passes for acting in it. It's not even the overall craptastic feel of the flick (a designation I created for films like Van Helsing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where sitting through them is almost an insult to moviegoing itself).
No, what's dreadful is that for all of what's wrong with it... Clash of the Titans seems mostly small and a bit boring.
An epic that never feels big enough, or long enough, Clash of the Titans may seem like the latest entry in overbuilt, overbudgeted seat filling monstrosities coming from Hollywood these days; but it's history is more convoluted and eccentric than the others. And the reason Clash fails to quite live up to expectations - good or bad - is, I suspect about its provenance: there's just a lot less interest in reviving the "sword and sandals" genre than many people may realize.
The original Clash of the Titans - fondly, if weirdly remembered by boys my age - showed up on the tail end of the first flirtation of the film business with cheesy epics shot in desert locales with a polyglot cast of international has beens and never weres. The idea was that the location shoots were less expensive, the stars were relatively cheap (but could "open" pictures in a number of countries), and the plots contained some mishmash of action, adventure, and vague attention to historical detail. Clash of the Titans is remembered bast for its special effects contribution to all of this, the use of dramatic stop-motion animation to pit people against fantastical monsters, with varying degress of believability and success.
Remaking Clash of the Titans - at a moment when CGI solves many of the problems presented in visual effects from the last time - has been something of a holy grail for geeks and sci-fi hounds; it's been long assumed that, if somebody put some effort, you could give Clash some modern sheen, and retain the goofy kick of the original. But to do that, really, you'd have to understand what the goofy kick was.
Things go wrong pretty much from the get-go here: a box is discovered by a fisherman off the Greek coast, containing a dead woman and a live baby. The baby quickly up-ages to become Perseus, raised by the fisherman's family, but actually the son of Zeus and the dead woman, a Queen of one of the Greek city-states, executed by her husband, for being led astray.
Perseus also quickly loses his fishing family when a statue of Zeus falls on their boat, pulled down by that soldiers of Argos. Perseus is recovered by the soldiers, brought back to Argos, and shortly is leading a band of ragtag soldiers on a quest to kill Hades (who, of course, can't be killed since he's a God... but never mind).
Along the way, the ragtag band faces giant scorpions, pairs up with the Djinn (mythical creatures who have nothing, of course, to do with ancient Greek myth and legend), and eventually travels to find Medusa in the underworld, so they can use her head to stop the Kraken (a Norse monster of legend... oh why bother).
The plot has holes big enough to drive a bus through, though that is, again, not the biggest problem here. A thin set of action sequences (badly set up and sloppily edited to boot) can barely mask that the script is a wooden, lumpy mess, action being preferable to dull speeches about valor and revelations of plot that don't even move the story along. Still, the script's real muddle is thematic: myths and legends work, essentially, because the stories are stark: there is clear delineation between good and bad, moral choices are clear, and the drama comes from the clear conflict between rival forces. Nothing is clear here in Clash: not the Gods and their motives, not the indiscriminate killings of humans at a number of plot points, nor the alliances between characters whose goals and motives don't really intersect (that's especially true with the pointless, silly inclusion of the Djinn). Lacking a firm moral compass, Clash seems unable to create a sense of meaning in what happens, or why we should care.
As Perseus, Sam Worthington is about what he was in the live action sequences of Avatar: steely, blocky, with little range as an actor; he's got little to work with, and makes no sense of Perseus or his motives, and leaves a muddle at the center where a compelling lead needs to be (contrast that with the young, pretty, hammy performance of Harry Hamlin in the original, and you get a sense of what's not here). Worthington's approach made me think of Charlton Heston, but Heston's mocked-up seriousness was leavened by others taking thngs less seriously, and even Heston knew best how to deploy his square jawed looks and Mr. Atlas physique. Worthington, as young serious boytoys do these days, covers himself up in one piece tunics and two piece rough top and miniskirt ensembles that do nothing for his figure, or the firm masculinity he's trying to project.
Overall, the fim struggles with a similar square humorlessness, missing the elements of kitsch and camp that the original sword and sandals pics brought to the equation. As with Worthington, Lindy Hemmings, usually fairly witty in her costume designs, plays it too safe and too modest in all her looks, missing the light, barely there qualities of tunics and togas cut high on the thigh and deep in the bosom (for both boys and girls). In that sense, and others, I think many have missed what made 300 work in transcending, and extrapolating on traditional swords and sandals conventions: the leather speedo and ripped abs look may have been silly and over the top... but it's that quality of too much that Clash sorely needs, which would make its muddled myths and lazy acting (I'm trying very hard to ignore the sloppy, embarrassing work of Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, both of whom should cash their checks and take a good, long rest before looking for more parts) less central to its failure.
Occasionally, Clash has glimpses at its own absurdity: there's a minor moment when one of the older soldiers, after washing his hands, grabs the bottom of his young acolyte's high cut tunic as his towel, grazing the top of his thigh. The look between the two is just sly enough and long enough to comment on the oddly intimate gesture; but in general, Clash doesn't even try, lumbering along to its dull conclusion. Whether it makes enough money to warrant further sword and sandal epics or not, Clash isn't any indication that the world is waiting for it; we'll know more, I suspect, when the (so far disastrous seeming) Prince of Persia demonstrates whether Jake Gyllenhaal can outperform Worthington separates, but I'm guessing the appetite, in the long run, just isn't there. Clash of the Titans doesn't have the verve or the humor to lift its miniskirts and show us the real action... and really, it's not like had all that far to go.
Put.
The Kraken.
Back.
Posted by: jinb | April 12, 2010 at 08:00 PM