Clash demi-epic has more sandals than swords

One of the greatest movies ever was utterly destroyed over the weekend.

Far from a pure re-telling, Clash of the Titans was instead dissected and rearranged like a poor frog specimen after a sadistic but smart high school biology student played mix’n’match with its parts. The new version has many of the same elements but in different orders and strung together with a coarser rope of a plot than the original. Some parts are even flat out opposite to how Harry Hamlin and Laurence Olivier did things back in 1981. Nearly three decades of revisionist Greek mythology has not improved a thing.

Instead of the story starting with one man trying to defy the gods and avoid his foretold demise, this bastardization begins as a whole city demonstrates its interest in living free of the influence of Zeus (Liam Neeson) and all the otherworldly celestial entities. They decide that instead of writing a strongly worded letter addressed to the top of Mount Olympus, they simply topple a gargantuan statue of Zeus as a way of chiselling the gods down to human size. Unironically, Zeus has a bit of a god complex and takes great offence, something he must nip in the bud. He dictates a return to the order of things.

Perseus (Sam Worthington), the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, finds himself in the precarious position of being a demigod. He chooses to fight for humankind's right to party, leading him off on a series of adventures as he must save the woman he loves. Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), the beautiful daughter of the royal family that presides over the statue-toppling town of Argos, was chosen by Zeus to bear the brunt of the punishment by facing the dreaded Kraken, a sea monster under the control of Hades (Ralph Fiennes), Zeus' brother. If you haven't checked this show out yet then just try to imagine what the rest of the fleshed out film is like. The answer is this: long.

So much else is wrong here that it's a challenge to summarize. The trailers (and my childish hopes) intimated this would be action intensive. Sadly, no. This is more about one man's physical and emotional journey than it is a war epic with monsters and deities. The hefty amount of makeup and hair prosthetics applied to some of the characters was off-putting. The design of the body armour left me wondering if Joel Schumacher had a hand in it. Director Louis Leterrier previously was at least partially if not wholly responsible for both Transporter movies and The Incredible Hulk, all entirely forgettable pieces that should have been all-around awesome. He continues to suck all the fun out of cinema here. This is a hack job if there ever was one. The script wasn't all that bad until he got his grimy mitts on it.

Strangely, the assemblage of otherwise fine actors really, really stunk especially in regards to Ralph Fiennes. His performances are generally of such high calibre that he should get an Oscar every time he lifts an eyebrow. Here he chewed through his scenes like no one ever told him to pull back a bit. The voice that he chose for the God of the Underworld was as irksome as Christian Bale's gruff and grumble Batman in The Dark Knight.

It's strange that so-called Greeks in various films always seem to be portrayed with distinctly non-Latin or even Italian accents. Here, our lead cast speaks with mostly British tones with some Australian and Irish thrown in too. The expensive CG looks worse than Ray Harryhausen's crude clay models, rendering a movie into 3D after the fact is always a bad idea, and even the Kraken was built up to be a terrifying titan, but considering we see it all over the ads our imaginations don't get to run wild with it first.

No the worst thing about it was that the beloved mechanical golden owl, Bubo, only got two seconds of screen time before he was put away.