Clash of the Titans (2010)
Directed by Louis Leterrier
Written by Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi
Starring Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes

Sam Worthington is carving out a nice little niche for himself playing fantastic half-breeds. The Australian first gained Stateside notice playing the robot-that-isn’t in last year’s Terminator: Salvation and became a pretty big deal as the Na’vi-that-isn’t in the Oscar also-ran Avatar. Now, he’s gone for the three-peat as the demi-god Perseus, forsaking his divine parentage in this remake of the 1981 special-effects extravaganza. He does a pretty good job at it, being just ruggedly handsome enough to hold our attention between the big CG set pieces. The rest of the cast manages to hold their own, even if they sort of lose their personality once the necessary introductions are out of the way.

If you’re not familiar with the story of Clash, don’t worry. Man loses family, man declares revenge on the gods, finds out his father is a god, kicks a lot of ass to get his revenge anyway. It really is an excuse to throw a seemingly endless line of giant monsters at our heroes, which is just fine with us. More than anything, it strikes me as the metalhead fever-dream of what Greek mythology really should have been like.

One of the great things about this movie is that it never takes itself too terribly seriously. It knows exactly what it is, having had the benefit of seeing what its pedigree was. The original Clash (at least, to my uncultured view) was one of those slices of perfect 80s cheese that you couldn’t help but love. This new version might just occupy the same piece of our hearts in this generation — that is, if it can overcome the burden of being the first truly terrible 3D movie to come out since the revamped technology came back.

I won’t go into a big rant about how the 3D sucked and ruined the movie-watching experience for me. For one thing, other reviewers have covered that angle pretty thoroughly, and for another I didn’t bother seeing it in 3D. If there’s a chance that crappy conversion was going to ruin something, the solution is pretty obvious to me. You just see it the way old-fashioned people do and leave it at that. Problem solved.

There were only a few shots that looked like they would have come off better in 3D, but for the most part you can just save yourself the $5 and not feel like you’ve missed anything. The creatrues in this movie are pretty awesome — everything from the Medusa to the pegasus to the Kraken are just top-notch. The pegasus is especially noteworthy, actually. It’s really easy to make a winged horse look rather doofy, but here they take great care to make it feasible. In fact, I left the theater actually wanting one. (If a movie can make you want anything popularized by Lisa Frank, chances are it’s doing something right.)

Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes bring the necessary gravity to their godly characters, and the setting of Zeus’ throne room, with its real-time map-of-the-world floor, is also very very cool. The movie is infused with that cheesy, fever-dream quality of a good Greco-Roman myth, high on magical realism and melodrama. For two hours well-spent in the company of mindless entertainment, you could certainly do a lot worse.