Main cast: Henry Cavill (Theseus), Stephen Dorff (Stavros), Luke Evans (Zeus), Freida Pinto (Phaedra), Isabel Lucas (Athena), Kellan Lutz (Poseidon), Peter Stebbings (Helios), Anne Day-Jones (Aethra), Corey Sevier (Apollo), Alan Van Sprang (Dareios), and Mickey Rourke (King Hyperion)
Director: Tarsem Singh
Hollywood takes aim at Theseus in its most recent bastardization of Greek mythology in the name of making pots of money. This time around, Theseus is a shiny muscle-bound dude who lives with his mother in a trailer home somewhere in a village near Mount Tartarus. Mount Tartarus happens to be where zeus imprisoned the Titans, forcing those poor suckers to spend eternity munching on iron bars. Our villain, King Hyperion, is determined to free the Titans in order to take on the heavens, as once again Zeus screwed up when it comes to human diplomacy and refuses to take the blame. So, the King’s army is now marching on Theseus’s ghetto trailer park home, and the next thing we know, his mother bites the big one.
Now, Zeus in the form of John Hurt has been secretly training Theseus to be a superhero all this while. so Theseus dons his tightest loincloth and starts kicking rear ends. Meanwhile, Zeus is busy cavorting with the half-naked werewolf guys from Twilight and making eyes at his own daughter Athena, and he warns them not to stop the orgy to save Theseus and other humans. Let those mortals bake their own cake! Zeus secretly training Theseus doesn’t count as godly interference, because… I don’t know. Maybe it’s not interference if Zeus is getting other benefits from Theseus, heh.
Anyway, it’s not long before Theseus joins forces with Stephen Dorff, some Oracle damsel, and an idiot priest in search of a magic bow, which Theseus loses to a dog five seconds after finding it by chance. King Hyperion trashes everyone and proves to the world that steroids trump dim-witted beefcake every time, Freida Pinto looks very pretty and shows some flesh, Stephen Dorff curses the fact that he could’ve carried the movie better than the pretty plank Henry Cavill if only he didn’t sport that awful receding hairline, and various unimportant secondary characters die as this movie lumbers and stumbles its way into a happy ending that is completely undeserved.
Why is the happy ending undeserved? Because the good guys are so freaking stupid and incompetent, and the Greek gods are nowhere better. Immortals is a lumbering braindead mess – the story would have been ten minutes long if Zeus had just killed Theseus, because then the stupid magic bow will never be found and King Hyperion will never be able to free the Titans. Indeed, this is a movie where the hero ends up making a mess out of everything. Nearly every death in this movie can be blamed on his incompetence.
As for the special effects, everything here looks desolate, drab, and ugly, so I’d have asked my money back from the CGI people if I were the one funding this crappy movie. Then again, if I were funding this movie, I might as well toss out the script and have the characters just have a naked orgy for two hours. That would have been a far more palatable movie that this colossal waste of time.
