Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
Sea of Suck.
One of the may lies I tell myself frequently (along with I am not a self delusional megalomaniac and the only reason I am still single is I haven’t met the right girl yet) is that I am actually impartial in these reviews and allow each film to stand on it’s own merits regardless of how much it’s predecessor, director, or source material may or may not suck.
Like most of my comfort lies this is sort of true but sort of not. I do try to stay impartial, but when handed a film by Lucas, McG, or anything with sparkly vampires I tend to show up at the theater with my canines sharpened, salivating at the smell of fresh blood in the air. At this point I when I start off a review with something like this I usually say something like “But this one surprised me and made me ashamed of my natural predilection” but honestly, my instinct was pretty spot on. There was blood in the water and when I followed the trail I found a fat, badly wounded sea lion to chomp on.
My predispostion stems from making the mistake of watching Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. That movie also suckled at the suck teat, but honestly it was a more solid effort than this garbage. At least all the actors made an effort and tried to look like they cared. In this film the actors all looked like they had been rejected by a Thunderbirds casting call. I honestly can’t imagine any director going with the performances delivered. The whole thing had a very Ed Wood style to it. “Act scared! More scared. Too much scared! Now act sad. Cut! That’s a wrap! Next scene!”
So this movie is left with all the crap that clogged down the last film (the story equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a horse, a base premise that suspends your disbelief so high it needs oxygen masks, and a desperation to be the next Harry Potter so tangible you can almost hear the director demanding that the prop guy design some Greek flying brooms) without any of the parts that made the first movie not quite a grilled cheese and razor blade sandwich. Normally to get a shift in acting talent this severe you have to go with a new cast, but it looks like the crew took one look at the script and opted to do the whole movie on dog tranquilizers.
Speaking of Harry Potter (and attempting to recreate that magic) they cast a new guy as Percy’s brother who looks like his real brother was Ron Weasley. Honestly, that’s just pandering. They kind of missed the point of Harry Potter and the humor level in those films when they opted to add in slapstick humor with metronome-like regularity. I also had a nice reminder of the difference in movie ratings. It’s often you will find me railing at a PG-13 when the action pretty clearly called for R, but this movie had me yearning for the good old days of PG-13. I’ve seen more violent and dangerous pillow fights.
I do feel like a bit of an ass bitching about too much deus ex machina in a movie about gods, but it looks like the writer learned about deus ex machina but was never told that it is a lazy writers tool to move the story along and therefore bad. It’s like if you house trained your dog by giving him a treat every time he craps on the carpet. The crew needs to find a mysterious island and has no way of finding it? Let’s have three blind witches give them literal map coordinates. Scooby Doo would be embarrassed by that. They need to get from a dock to a ship out at sea? They pray to Poseidon and he sends a giant water horse to carry them. I have never seen it so blatant before. In the great words of Gunnery Sergent Hartman from Full Metal Jacket “If God would have wanted you up there he would have miracled your ass up there by now, wouldn’t he?” In this case the god did want them out to the ship.
Sigh. I could go on, so I will. The special effects ranged from halfway decent CGI to mediocre CGI all the way down to a corpse puppet that looked suspiciously like the Cryptkeepers wife (I’m not kidding). At some point they ran wanted to spice up the scenery so when they got to the mythic island where the cyclops guarding the Golden Fleece (which, by the way, is actually a fleece, not a gold threaded baby blanket) they find…an abandoned amusement park (again, no joke). The writers must have hit a “Buy one cliche, get 49 more free” sale and spent their life savings (including the inevitable trope of having the black guy dress up in drag). The villains plan was so painfully stupid you pitied him more for his learning disability than hated him for being evil. The CGI characters who spoke must have had the voices done by whatever jackass was hanging around the studio that morning. I think subconsciously the director understood what he was creating because at one point he had the main characters get sucked down in what can only be described as a giant toilet.
I really don’t want to do the story recap so I will buzz through. Percy is living at Camp Half Breed (isn’t the term Half Breed racist? I thought it referred negatively to a half Native American) with the other demigods, being annoyed by some new chick who is the daughter of Mars. The magic tree that protects the camp gets poisoned and a mechanical bull (looking extremely like one of my beloved Juggernauts from Warhammer) breaks in. Turns out they need the Golden Fleece to save the tree or be killed by something (apparently everyone in the universe that isn’t a part of their super guy camp hates them (including me)). The Mars chick is sent out but Percy, the blond girl from the last one, the black Satre, and Percy’s Ron Weasley looking Cyclops half brother (apparently if a god has sex with a nymph you end up with a cyclops. Does that mean that all cyclops’s are demigods?) go after it themselves. The Satre gets kidnapped by the bad guy from the last film leaving Percy, Ron, and the chick to complete the task (why does that party mix sound so familiar Harry?).
The bad guy’s plan is to use the Golden Fleece to resurrect Chronos, the original Titan known for eating all his children and have the guy destroy all the gods of Olympus and the world too (I guess the dude thought Chronos would stop at his grand children. See what I mean about a stupid plan?). They travel the world (where they apparently have friends in every city in the universe) and eventually end up on the amusement park island where they play keep away with Fleece from a cyclops who speaks like an Oxford don. Eventually Chronos is raised, only to be killed like 30 seconds later by Percy (why were they all afraid of this guy again?).
The stars.
Really there is only one, and that is Nathan Fillion as Hermes. I’m not sure what the hell he was doing in this film but seeing him was like a breath of fresh air after spending all day trapped in a rancid sewer (Nathan image courtesy of the Firefly T Shirt category). One star. Total: one star.
The black holes.
Being slapped across the face over and over again by the hand of god. One black hole. Acting like everyone was sleep deprived. One black hole. A plot that can be called a story only because we don’t have a word stupid enough to accurately describe it. Two black holes. Harry Potter rip off. One black hole. All those little things I listed four paragraphs ago. I count five items, with a bonus for the amusement park. Six stars. All the horrible comedy bits, especially the three blind sister taxi drivers. One black hole. I especially hated the new cyclops guy and wanted to see him die. One star. I didn’t talk about it much, but this film is kind of a step backwards in terms of racial equality as well as loving yourself for who you are (the cyclops seems really concerned with hiding his one eye instead of ever embracing it). One black hole. Total: fourteen black holes.
So a grand total of thirteen black holes. Not an auspicious number. Is there anything worth seeing? No, not really. I can’t even comment on the hotness of the girls in this film as a draw. I’ve seen nuns show more skin. This film is tanking at the box office and it’s easy to see why. I’d say give it a pass. Date movie? If your date is or has the mentality of an eleven year old girl maybe, although please go to jail. Bathroom break? There is not a single second of this film that is not an excellent time to run out and take a dump, so if you have the trots this might be the perfect film for you.
Thanks for reading. Headed to Vegas tomorrow so nothing going on blog wise until Thursday when the new Simon Pegg film comes out. Looks good. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu, like me on Facebook, and if you have a comment for this film or my review post it here. Feel free to email me with any off topic questions or comments to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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