Let me start off this review by saying one thing, I have no underwear o...oh wait that's the wrong script. Hang on a moment...ah here we are, It's good to be back! I know I haven't done a review for nearly a year now but I thought that now is as good a time as any to return to the world of critics, thus here I am! And I thought it only appropriate that I return to this glorious position of magnificence by doing one of the earliest types of reviews that I ever did, a film review!
In particular, I've chosen a strange specimen of a film in the sense that I see it as both being old and yet relatively new, and at the same time under-appreciated but also somewhat pretty weak. Now there are many films that fit this bill, but the one I have chosen is the 2010 adventure/action/comedy/mythology romp titled Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.
Like many such films mostly centred around action and adventure, we follow the rise to glory of an aspiring hero as they are flung out of the ordinary world and into a world where magic reigns, mythical creates represent challenges to the hero's weaknesses and where obnoxious and slightly irritating comedy relief characters hold reign over much of the side-plots In this case we follow the case of Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) who discovers through being attacked at a museum by a 'fury' from the legends of Greek myth that he is a demigod; a son of a mortal woman and the Greek sea god Poseidon. When he is attacked Percy discovers not only is he a demigod but also that his aforementioned, obnoxious comedy relief/best friend character Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) is a goat/man hybrid called a 'satyr' and that he himself is destined to be trained at a camp governed by the centaur Chiron (Pierce Brosnan) where demigods like himself spar in order to prepare for possible conflicts between the gods. Unfortunately for Percy, he is sent to this camp just as such a civil-war of the Greek gods is about to start over who has stolen mighty Zeus's (Sean Bean) master lighting bolt, the start of which sees the underworld god Hades (Steve Coogan) kidnap his mother and blackmail him into bringing the lightning bolt to the underworld in the suspicion that Percy is in possession of it. Naturally Percy is all for charging in to save his mother and the day but his superiors advise against it, however, he naturally disobeys them and thus sets out on an adventurous quest for clues to who the lightning thief is and how to get to the underworld with Grover and the demigod Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario) in tow.
And thus begins a supposedly epic adventure quest to save the damsel (or in this case, redundant mother character) in distress and save the world before it is literally ripped to shreds. Now this might seem like a somewhat familiar and run-of-the-mill premise for a story as it has been done before in films such as Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or Clash of the Titans (the 1981 original, not the 2010 crappy-ass remake), but what really makes this particular telling of such a tried and tested formula is the characters and the way that they interact with tenets of Greek mythology along the daring road of their quest. Percy Jackson in particular is played amusingly well by Lerman as he is shown to be your archetypal white, working-class pseudo-moody American teenager (at least how that demographic is shown by Hollywood movies) and yet is not awed by the fact that he is a demigod like so many movie heroes before him but is instead scared witless by the prospect of fighting in a mythical civil-war. This in turn is compounded by the comical way in which Percy points out the logical reasons and counter-arguments as to why it is so weird that his best friend is half goat and that he is the son of the sea god. On top of this, while Grover is most certainly annoying, he does provide some good comedy relief here and there by generally being both heroically loyal to Percy and a lecherous rouge with an addiction to the daughters of Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love). As for the references to Greek mythology, the main characters mainly go through these references by having to collect pearls in order to get out of the underworld which are in turn scattered throughout the lairs of Medusa (Uma Thurman), the mighty Hydra and the manipulative and mind-controlling lotus eaters. Most entertaining of all the Greek gods and mythological legends however is the role of Hades played by Coogan who shows the god of the underworld not as the brooding and brimstone-like creature of darkness in traditional Greek mythology but as a heavy rock-loving, leather-wearing biker with the laziest attitude to his whole scheme of evil that you'd see from any villain of his calibre.
However, as amusing as the references to Greek mythology, Coogan's Hades and the Percy/Grover duo are, this film does have its weak points, and by the electrifying beard of Zeus are they jarring. The foremost of these barricades to the film's success is the fact that the story is so token and so run-of-the-mill that it is sometimes very hard for the story to be propped up alone by the dashing and comedic exploits of our heroes. This perhaps would be a redundant problem were it not for the fact that Hades, Grover, Percy and the main and clunkily-revealed-at-the-last-minute main villain Luke (Jake Abel) are the only interesting and engaging characters who keep you drawn in to the story. As it is, all the other pivotal characters, most notably Annabeth, Percy's mother, Poseidon and even Pierce Brosnan's Chiron, are either underplayed to the extent that they are notably uninteresting or are simply shown so little throughout the film that they become redundant themselves both in character and relevance to the story. However, what is most personally grating to me is how badly the main villain,. Luke, is revealed to be the aforementioned lightning thief near to the end of the film in what has to be one of the most clunky, sudden and jarring character reveals in recent movie history. Just as Percy, Annabeth and Percy's mother escape from the underworld to deliver the master lightning bolt to Zeus, they are halted in their tracks atop the apex of the empire state building by Luke who has played the support character throughout the film by giving the main characters mythology-Intel and directions. Being the son of Hermes (the flying/fleet-footed messenger of the Greek gods) Luke swoops in, swipes the lighting bolt and literally out of the blue, almost immediately says to Percy's face "I'm the lightning thief". The fact that this is conveyed with so little build-up makes it one of the most underwhelming villain reveals I have seen in recent years and is further made worse by the fact that its done in the last (and uncomfortably-rushed) 15 minutes of the film.
Taking this all into account, it would be fair to say that Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is a poor excuse for an adventure film. However, it still holds up to no small extent as an action film with comedy elements such as Grover's lewdness and the riveting battles against the Hydra and the fight between Percy and Luke at the film's climax. Yet the cons of this film such as Percy's under-played ability to manipulate water and the slew of un-engaging side characters meant that when this film came out, it was generally under-appreciated in the sense that it had a more colourful main character than most films of its type in modern cinema and that it had some star actors such as Thurman, Brosnan and Coogan which were mostly ignored.
Yet I personally think that Chris Columbus's directing of Rick Riordan's novel of the same name is an admirable attempt to meld modern film-based pop culture with ancient and eternal mythology from a culture that spawned democracy. In conclusion: see this film but don't expect to be awed by its approach to ancient mythology.
I hope you enjoyed this review and as mentioned before...
I
HAVE
RETURNED!!!
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