Hate Him Back

There's a fork in the road of responsible criticism. There may be no way for me to know that Louis Leterrier was trying to make a bad movie, but I suspect he was, and with some subtlety. But does Clash of the Titans' badness transcend the traditional definition and put it in a class of the bold and unique? No, not at all. So I can saunter down giving it props for achieving its goals road or I can amble down state road fuck this movie. Either way, I imagine this entire review will be me wrestling with my opinions, dumping an arbitrary numerical score at the bottom of the page and taking a nap, because all roads lead to napville. I'll give Leterrier this much: the badness of Clash of the Titans is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is Sam Worthington's bizarre performance, ranking among the weirdest things born of laziness I've ever seen in a production of this size.

I'll give you guys a quick once-over with the plot, and you tell me what it sounds like. Innocent pile of mashed potatoes living an idyllic life with his super fantastic family is thrust into a situation where the good people of the land are facing a magical nemesis of God-like strength and who they cannot hope to defeat. For poorly explained reasons, our hero can do what thousands of trained, organized men cannot and break into the villain's house, jump him on the toilet and throw the elderly butler down two flights of stairs on the way out. On the way, he encounters dangerous beasts and servants of the villain with huge, glaring weaknesses that they're just begging you to exploit, and acquires many divine tools and weapons, one being a lightsaber, that help him out of overly specific situations.

For those of you who stay a step behind, that's also the plot description for all the Zelda games. Part of what makes this such a fascinating piece of shit is that it's a movie made for people who don't like movies, and would rather spend their time playing video games. Though the execution of this is sloppy because, like all video games, it's only possible to create awkward, stilted characters and narratives out of interactive media, I'm frightened that this will actually work, either now or in the immediate future, and that this is the trend that my beloved blockbuster will follow for the next decade. Not that my relationship with blockbusters has always been a good one. I'm not unaccustomed to bags of oranges reorganizing the layout of my stomach organs or finding myself in a club bathroom snorting cocaine off the ass of a willing woman, but this is a step down a path I'm not willing to follow, especially if Clash of the Titans is any indication of what to expect.

For instance, Sam Worthington was also in the much better Avatar last year where he also played a character whose middle name was Tabula Rasa. In Avatar, Jake Sully was a simple character who went through a simple arc and was like that so that any schmuck could relate and James Cameron could fuel his money-powered robohookers. In Clash of the Titans, Perseus is a personalityless blob because he's a player-controlled character and you want the player to project their own personality onto the character. The writers try to sidestep giving him human characteristics by making him stand for ideals that he has no basis to believe in, but everybody claims to believe in. In one scene he stands up to Zeus of all fucking people and tells him that he will not join the Gods because man stands together and their powerful sense of morality will prevail in the end. He makes a whole speech about brotherhood, clearly forgetting that the first fifteen minutes of the movie established him as sort of a shut-in who just hung out with his immediate family all the time. Yeah, his dad seemed like a pretty good role model, but his whole family was just four people, and they were all killed by the fifth person Perseus ever saw. He doesn't know shit about humanity, unless his fishing rod picks up public access and he's been watching soap operas on a pool skimmer.

So Perseus, as written, is a terrible character, but while the character is bad in an interesting way on paper, Sam Worthington's performance gives it an entirely new dimension of badness. If you remember the beginning of the Zelda games with any clarity, you remember that you always start as a nubile innocent, generally a child in tights whose route to the potion shop always involves skipping through a field of flowers, who never harms a thing and who has a song and a smile for all the creatures of the earth. But when that same player controlled character looks like a five o'clock shadowed, cigar chomping Sam Worthington, you've taken a candy-colored fun slide into a lysergic fever dream. Or maybe a Scandinavian art film. But it only ever gets stranger. For instance, the character and the performance are casually anachronistic, specifically in the face of elements of the production that actually give a shit. Like the silly ancient Greek hairstyles the entire cast sports, except for Sam Worthington who apparently buzzes his hair in the mornings. Or the Greek accents most of the cast makes a passing effort to adopt, except for Sam Worthington who perpetually sounds like he's on the lookout for a mob of kangaroos whose pouches he can hitch a ride in.

When I first heard about this project I got pretty excited. An action film set in Greek myth? I think there's an untapped vein there (though I have a new one to get excited about), and when Liam Neeson was cast as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades and Danny Huston as Poseidon, I thought this could be an incisive, well-acted film with a strong action filmmaker calling the shots. All three of those excellent actors are wasted in this film, though. Liam Neeson gives it a shot but can't act through all the effects and deliver the broad performance the script calls for, Ralph Fiennes, the best "villain character actor" we have in American commercial cinema (except maybe Mark Strong these days) shuffles around wheezing but otherwise acts exactly like Ganondorf, and Danny Huston, who has one line, actually manages to make it out of the film without a scar on his resume. The only person I actively liked in this film was Mads Mikkelsen, a brilliant actor in the European arthouse who played Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and quickly became my all-time favorite Bond villain. His presence was a small consolation, but the man deserves better than this, like a job at the county fair.

I suppose the last six paragraphs I wrote could be rendered moot if the film delivered on the basic levels it's meant to, but it doesn't. I almost missed the slow-motion copper dude porn of 300 during Clash of the Titans' action scenes: at least you could see what was happening in those. People bitch about shakycam ruining movies and giving them a headache (pussies), but they're cool with something like this, where the action is a series of things flying by the camera too close for us to tell what the object actually is, cut together with a maddening disregard for things like blocking and topped off with a shot of Sam Worthington standing on a pile of corpses playing air guitar.

I find it hard to believe that Louis "Hose Fighting" Leterrier directed Clash of the Titans and that movie where Jet Li played a kung-fu fighting dog. You know, the one with Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, the one that got the art crowd to pay attention to martial arts movies for a minute. I thought The Incredible Hulk was pretty mediocre, but I was still enthusiastic about this guy. His directorial choices are baffling here, though. His production design is awful; one scene, for instance, looks like 10% of the original Dagobah set was salvaged, filled with green floodlights and stuffed into frame. It shows a jarring lack of care when all the CGI shots are framed and composed so carefully and the live-action shots are stationary cameras on a flat angle encompassing the whole set so that the actors can wander around during dialogue. That's called a play, it looks boring on a big screen and more green floodlights won't change that.

It also has some of the worst CGI I've ever seen, so no mild consolation for those of us who like to absentmindedly stare at CGI. Many of the CGI shots are textureless, and even more have a an ugly sheen to them, specifically Zeus. I saw it in 2D, but I wonder if this is an effect that the 3D upconversion had on the film. Zeus has an awkward flatness to him when he's glowing, as if he's meant to be popping out and the people responsible for the upconversion used that scene's lighting as an excuse to really fuck with the depth.

So it's bad, yeah. But it's certainly interesting. I wasn't angry walking out of it like I was walking out of Alice in Wonderland. I was pumped up and benign, excited to discuss its tremendous failures with my friends. For now, it has the unmistakable gloss of the CGI boom and is something to be looked at with contempt. But someday, when it has aged badly, it may make a good midnight film.

2/10