2 gibbles out of 5

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

So even though everyone seemed to agree that the Clash of the Titans remake was ho-hum, it still made some money and they still started working on the sequel.  I was excited because I actually enjoyed the first one – it was surprisingly ungracious for such an effects based movie, moving quickly through its action sequences in a sort of bumbling manner to have faceless everyman Sam Worthington walk about expansive landscapes as the camera swooped by and Ramin Djawadi’s awesome score kept things moving.  In the theater I fell asleep.

In Wrath of the Titans, director Jonathan Liebesman seems to have a better grasp on action sequences than Clash’s director Louis Letterier – whose keep-moving pace worked well for his Hulk film but seemed like he didn’t use a sense of scale properly for making Clash feel like something epic – and yet I still fell asleep.

The difference is that Clash seemed fun for some reason, that even though I dozed during some important middle pieces, I enjoyed what I was watching, feeling like it was sort of sloppy fun, maybe thrown together for some quick movie bucks (it did make some hundreds of millions…), but thrown together by a team that seemed to like the balance of silly and serious that the original offered.  I was excited for it to come out on bluray because I knew it would be an enjoyable repeated-watch movie, and it was.  Wrath, on the other hand… was somewhat boring.  It suffers from some sequelness – the need to top its original, the compromise between you know this character / let’s reintroduce this character – but mostly it suffers from a lack of fun.

In many big budget action movies, the joy comes from the application of the budget and the predictability.  You don’t go in expecting something amazing plot-wise – you go in to see a lot of dollars make something neat happen on screen, punctuated by some one-liners.  Different things make this more or less successful, but the general formula has remained very reliable.  Hero make things go boom and win.

I still like Sam Worthington.  He’s so plain and seems eager to do the best he can in a movie.  He’s not a bad actor, I just don’t know how much dimension there is to him.  So he’s a good guy to have wacky things happening around, as he’s identifiable enough to want to watch him onscreen but not so much that his name needs to appear in lights before the title of the film.  Clash of the Titans casts him as an underdog against the gods, but here we know he’s done his big battles before, and plus, the gods are on his side now.  No one doubts the film’s conclusion, but Wrath doesn’t try to muster up much drama: obstacle, big battle, next obstacle, big battle.

I could go on beating this horse.  Clash of the Titans worked for me thanks to its almost clumsy style.  Wrath is much better in terms of structure – plot points A, B, and C are all evenly spaced – and style – it’s shot smoothly and effectively – but stripped of that clumsiness it loses the hokey fun Clash had.  It’s enjoyable.  But so are a lot of movies.

"Bro, I just wanted to tell you that I liked your hair."