Ah, Clash of the Titans. The movie we’ve all been waiting for since the previews started dominating commercials during The Office. A remake of a movie that sucked 30 years ago must be good, right? And better yet, it’s directed by Louis Leterrier, a director known for raping The Incredible Hulk and starring Sam Worthington who had a hand in destroying the Terminator
Clash of the Titans starts with horribly-rendered CGI coffin rising from the sea and being pulled up by a fisherman, Roland Tembo (The Lost World: Jurassic Park was on TV the other night, you have to be a nerd to understand the reference). Roland opens the coffin to find a dead girl and a baby, whom he raises as his own and then meets a horrible death about 25 years later (which is about 5 seconds in movie time), prompting the baby, Jake Sully, to go out and take revenge on the gods for killing his family. Then we meet the gods, who are composed of Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, and some other random people who don’t matter. It turns out that gods are whiny, attention-loving bitches and have decided that the best way to get people to like them again is to kill them in the most horrible way possible. I believe there are people like this on Criminal Minds.
So Jake Sully elects to join a band of macho warriors lead by La Chiffre from Casino Royale and are too lazy to work out (they wear body armor in the shape of abs...that's cheating) to kill the Kraken, who’s played by the Cloverfield monster. See, the Cloverfield monster, back before his days ravaging New York and killing 20-somethings, was a pet of the gods who went around fucking up cities whenever the gods felt like they weren’t getting enough attention.
Apparently.
This is a review and I don’t really like to go into details about the plot so I’ll simply sum up the movie in one sentence: Clash of the Titans is a fucking mess.
You know that 10-page paper you decide to write the night before its due and bang it out in 20 minutes after a brief Google run? That’s Clash of the Titans. It’s a messy jumble of random scenes stitched sloppily together into a premise that feels about as logical as one of those creepy anime movies. There’s a random semi-hot girl who follows Jake Sully around for no fucking reason other than to tell the audience the back story that Louis Leterrier is too lazy to actually show us. There’s about as much action as we saw in the 2-minute preview. The actors are practically reading their lines off of cue cards. And to top everything off, I’ve seen better special effects in those cheap movies on the Sci-Fi channel.
By about halfway through the film, right about the time that Jake Sully cuts his way out of a giant scorpion’s stomach, you start to realize that the movie’s slowly beginning to dissolve into a vat of stupidity. I can always think to myself, “Okay, it’s going to get better. As soon as the monsters show up, it’ll get better.” Well guess what: it doesn’t. For a movie that promotes itself with giant monsters battling gods it sure as hell doesn’t show us much of it. You know that shot in the preview where the Kraken opens its mouth and roars for two seconds? Well that’s about as much of him as we get to see before it’s gone. Seriously.
Forgive me for stealing a joke from Family Guy, but I was under the impression the name of the film was Clash of the Titans not Random People We Don't Care About get Killed by Random Monsters we Don't Care About.
Louis Leterrier doesn’t seem to care about the movie and as a result neither do we. Jake Sully’s family’s literally on screen for about five minutes, with the mother and sister never uttering a single line, and we’re expected to actually give a shit when they die. There’s a princess who, if she’s sacrificed, will end the Kraken’s wrath. And for some reason, despite the fact that she has maybe two or three lines, we’re supposed to feel something for her. If I was one of those guys in the town about to get destroyed that bitch would be going down. Zeus is supposed to “love” humans, and the other gods remind us of it constantly, yet at the same time he has no trouble killing them with a smile on his face. What the fuck? Either you hate humans or you love them, you can’t just switch whenever it’s convenient for the script. The characters, for the most part, are disposable and the few that we do actually get to like are killed within seconds. There’s one part of the film where they invade Medusa’s lair and one of the movie's most likable characters is killed in the corner of the f*cking screen while the action’s focused on Jake Sully. Fuck you, Louis! You made me sit there for an hour and a half watching these characters and then you wipe them out without so much as a second thought.
The movie doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. The acting’s stiff, the script’s a mess and the visuals aren’t much better than those seen in Xbox games. Sam Worthington plays the exact same person he played in Avatar and Terminator Salvation and Louis Letterier’s direction is totally careless. There’s a scene where a bad guy’s hand is cut off and it's seen turning into a monster. I’m thinking, “Oh shit, that’ll totally turn into a huge monster and kick some CGI ass!” Nope. Doesn’t happen. It’s never mentioned again. It’s like Leterrier completely forgot about it because he was too busy figuring out how to make all of the actors’ skirts shorter.
Why is it that certain directors get to keep making multi-million dollar movies even when their movies suck? In professional sports, if a player has a bad game they either A) get benched or B) sign with the Raiders. Shouldn’t it be the same way in Hollywood? If Louis Leterrier obviously can’t direct a good movie to save his life then stop fucking paying him for it.
Clash of the Titans is lazily shot, horribly written, and sloppily directed. It isn’t worth the film it’s printed, let alone two hours of your life. Do yourself a favor and just rip up some man-cards and go see How to Train Your Dragon. Trust me, it’s far more badass.
