Clash of the Titans

Sam Worthington plays the demigod hero Perseus on a quest to protect an uppity human race from becoming collateral damage in a sibling rivalry between big-bearded gods Zeus (Liam Neeson) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes). He has help from Gemma Arterton as a sort of guardian-angel and Mads Mikkelsen as a noble warrior. The rest is business as usual: swords, sandals, giant scorpions. Mythology has been prone to retellings and retellings of retellings for millennia. That’s fine; that’s how it works. It generally doesn’t work by boring us and insulting our intelligence. Yet here comes director Louis Leterrier and his team of mercenary screenwriters to make sure a dated, lumbering mytho-fantastical clunker from 1981 gets a bland, moronic, computer-enhanced warming over by the 21st-century Hollywood remake machine. Neeson manages immortality with one enthusiastic line reading, but you already knew that from the trailer.