Film review: Wrath of the Titans

WRATH OF THE TITANS (12A)

Directed by: JONATHAN LIBESMAN

Starring: SAM WORTHINGTON, LIAM NEESON, RALPH FIENNES, ROSAMUND PIKE, TOBY KEBBELL

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Given that money is the only thing Hollywood truly worships, a sequel was inevitable the moment the first weekend’s receipts were in, so there’s an amusing irony in the fact that the plot of Wrath of the Titans should hinge on the notion that human indifference to the gods has diminished their power. When Zeus (Liam Neeson, leading with his beard) confesses to his demigod son Perseus (Sam Worthington) that he’s not quite the god he used to be thanks to those pesky mortals neglecting to worship him, it feels like a sneaky joke on the part of the filmmakers – as if they’re blatantly commenting on the way the movie biz works to see if the undiscerning punters who made the first film a hit are aware that they’re fuelling the production of these films with their unquestioning patronage.

Or perhaps this is just the unintended consequence of trying to come up with a barebones story that can justify the wall-to-wall spectacle Wrath throws at us. In this respect, the film is actually a little better than its predecessor (some of the action is actually coherent and the production design is far grander and more immediately striking in scale). Nevertheless, relentless set-pieces – even ones featuring, booby-trapped mazes, rampaging cyclopes and lava-spewing behemoths – do have a habit of blending together as background colour and noise in the absence of a decent plot.

The perfunctory story the four credited writers of Wrath of the Titans have come up with takes place ten years after the events of the first film and finds Perseus attempting to play down his previous Kraken-releasing exploits by leading the quiet life of a fisherman and raising his young son by himself. Dreams of a civilisation-threatening apocalypse, however, start making him nervous about the future, and before long he realises he really should have come to Zeus’s aid when he came looking for help to defend the status quo against the forces of the underworld.

With Zeus subsequently captured by his banished sibling Hades (Ralph Fiennes) – and Hades in turn concocting a plan with Zeus’s own scorned son Ares (Édgar Ramírez) to siphon off Zeus’s considerable powers and transfer them to Kronos, the underworld-imprisoned father of Zeus, Hades and Poseidon (got all that?) – Perseus realises he must team up with his cousin Agenor (Toby Kebbell), the wayward son of Poseidon (Danny Huston), in order to rescue Zeus and hopefully save the Earth so that his own son Helius (John Bell) can have a decent life.

With a veritable smorgasboard of clunking father-son stories right there, the film proceeds to nibble on them without really sinking its teeth into anything satisfactory as it rushes to get to the next big set-piece. Along the way familiar character actors don bushy beards and pick up what one can only hope are hefty paychecks to spout an array of expository dialogue. Here, at least, a Yorkshire-accented Bill Nighy accidentally classes the film up as Hephaestus, the half-mad builder of the gods’ weaponry and designer of the labyrinth that will lead Perseus to the underworld. Alas, the film doesn’t keep him around for long enough to be anything more than a brief, humorous respite from Worthington’s plodding presence.

Rosamund Pike is similarly underserved as Andromeda, though her mistreatment by the material is even worse given that she’s in pretty much the entire movie. Decked out in an unflattering war tunic and asked to deliver honking lines and bewildered looking battle cries (before eventually being reduced to Perseus’s love interest, despite the film failing to adequately set this up), her presence is tokenistic at best – she’s the only woman in the film – and the role is unworthy of her talents.

By contrast, Fiennes and Neeson are at least given things to do and lines to say that affect the outcome of the plot, though that perhaps isn’t saying much; further proof that the script wasn’t intended as anything other than the roughest blueprint for the action is evident in the slapdash approach to the dialogue, which veers from cod classics-style pomposity to anachronistic modern-day banter. That it’s delivered via an inconsistent array of accents by the cast suggests the continuity person gave up somewhere around day two of the shoot.

It’s too bad, because while a film like this doesn’t need to be an artistic masterpiece to be worthwhile entertainment, it shouldn’t arrogantly assume such sloppy storytelling is enough to get by. Who knows? Audiences might not always be so forgiving.