By Matthew Jackson
Staff Reporter
HUNTSVILLE — Have you ever walked into a movie that you’ve been dreaming of seeing and found that, no matter how much of your own glorious hopes you attempt to project upon it, it still, well ... sucks?
I wanted “Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief” to be great, I really did. I wanted it be Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Clash of the Titans all rolled into one big, slightly funny but always exciting loaf of popcorn cinema bliss.
What I got was a disjointed, corny, ill-paced and at times inappropriate boondoggle that truly shows just how badly Hollywood can screw up a great concept if they really put their mind to it.
Based on the mammoth bestseller by Rick Riordan, the film follows Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman), a teenage boy who doesn’t fit in and really digs water, who suddenly finds that he’s not just an ordinary awkward teenager. He is, in fact, a demigod, son of the Greek God of the Sea, Poseidon (Kevin McKidd).
When a substitute teacher suddenly transforms into a hideous winged Fury and tries to kill him, Percy finds himself embroiled in a cosmic conspiracy. His best friend Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), is actually a satyr who’s been protecting him from evil. His favorite teacher (Pierce Brosnan) is actually the legendary centaur Chiron, trainer of Hercules. And his mother (Catherine Keener) has been keeping the secret of who his father was since Percy was born.
After escaping the clutches of a mammoth Minotaur (and losing his mother in the process), Percy is taken to Camp Half-Blood, a training center for demigods like himself, where he meets the feisty Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), and is given a quest. Zeus’ legendary lightning bolt has been stolen, and the King of the Gods seems to think that Percy is the culprit. To save himself, and prevent war between his father and his uncle (if none of this is making sense to you, you should brush up on mythology), Percy must embark on a quest to find the true lightning thief, with only Annabeth and Grover to help him.
Readers of Riordan’s novels will note significant changes from director Chris Columbus and writer Craig Titley (not the least of which is the aging of the characters), but I’m not going to harp about that. I’ve seen fantastic adaptations of novels that included some drastic changes (most notably last year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”), and I’m not reviewing an adaptation, I’m reviewing a film.
The problem is that, regardless of how different it is from the novel, the screen story simply fails to homogenize. The characters never quite develop, the plot speeds up and slows down like a gerbil on a wheel, and the devices used to move the story forward are hokey at best. What could have been a rip-roaring adventure flick winds up being a series of disjointed encounters with monsters and magic, each of which ends up having issues of its own. There are fragments of worthwhile things here, to be sure, but none of them hold together.
To be fair, the film has a built-in difficulty level when it comes to suspended disbelief. Anytime you start talking about gods and monsters, you have to be careful of the inevitable cheese factor, and when that cheesiness creeps in, you can either embrace it or attempt to slice it out altogether; it’s a fine line to walk. Columbus, it seems, never really made that decision. His portrayal of the gods present in the film, including Poseidon, Zeus (an underutilized Sean Bean) and Hades (an out of place Steve Coogan) ranges from funny to overly serious to downright outlandish (they appear as giants at one point, and come far too close to evoking “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” jokes). And the monsters, don’t get me started on the monsters (Uma Thurman as Medusa, puh-lease!).
The performances are wavering even in their best moments, particularly that of Lerman, but before I condemn him to the realm of good-looking child stars who just don’t have chops, he might just have an excuse. While any other kid would be flat-out dazed and confused by the experience Percy goes through, the character is given an oversized dollop of confidence and callousness that makes him appear cocky in his best moments, and flat-out obnoxious in his worst (including the use of some carefully placed hero puns). It’s not Lerman’s fault, really – after all, he didn’t write the flick – but his performance misses any possible emotional core, leaving Percy with almost zero empathy. The real star of the film is Jackson (the second best part of “Tropic Thunder,” right behind Robert Downey Jr.). He literally steals every scene, and serves as a comic beacon amid the cinematic chaos.
I went in to “The Lightning Thief” hoping for the best, and I got the worst. I have nothing against corny flicks, but there’s an art to it, and whatever art this film might have had is lost in a sea of bad jokes, bad villains and bad plot. The concept had potential, and the squandering of that is, in my eyes, a Greek tragedy (Yeah, yeah, I know. Bad joke, but I couldn’t resist).
Matt’s Call: The special effects are something for the kids to “ooo” and “ah” at, and there are some genuinely entertaining moments, but as far as epic family fantasies go, this is the worst I’ve seen in quite a while.
