No Effort At All Had Been Put Into It

Rating: 3/10 (15 September 2010)

A severe disappointment. To be honest, I could only expect this one to be a movie with "great visuals, but weak story," but I was unprepared for just how bad this movie was.
My first huge complaint with this movie is with Sam Worthington and the character he plays. Worthington seems to be making a point to play overly bland characters. In Avatar, he played a character who's part could have been covered by anyone--literally anyone, with the movie's CGI his role could have been filled by an ape--and Worthington didn't bring anything to the table. In Clash of the Titans, he brings less than nothing to the table. His performance is so wooden and his character is so bland, that I was more interested in Medusa, who has no lines and is only in fifteen minutes of the movie, than his character, Perseus. I couldn't get over how bland his character was; I just kept thinking to myself "Wow. I didn't realize Perseus was so boring." But Worthington wasn't the only bland character in this movie. Liam Neeson (Schindler's List, Star Wars I, Batman Begins) and Ralph Fiennes (Schindler's List, Harry Potter 4 & 5, Red Dragon) I can usually trust to give great performances and were the main reasons I decided to give this picture a chance. To my great astonishment, not only do both actors portray boring characters, but both actors are just so bad. Liam Neeson keeps putting weird inflections into everything he says and Ralph Fiennes plays half of the movie with this annoying hoarse voice and sounding like he wants to get up a fur ball.
And then there's the movie's dialogue. Again, I wasn't looking for anything particularly phenomenal; just competence. The dialogue was so stilted and so bad that I was hoping that the last hour of the movie would be played in silence. It wasn't the worse dialogue I've ever heard; if it had that probably would have been fun to listen to. The dialogue was just so mediocre--as though no effort at all had been put into it--that it really gave me pain to listen to it.
Usually in these kinds of films, they can make up for a lot of their short comings with good action. Not in Clash of the Titans. The action scenes are thrown haphazardly together and sometimes you can't even tell what's going on because the director made the awful choice of using shaky-cam while filming the intense action sequences. I felt like I was watching Cloverfield again, but in Cloverfield you were supposed to not know exactly what was going on, but you did get enough information to know. Here, you get nothing. At one point, Perseus jumps out of a giant scorpion's back. I guess I missed how he got in there in the first place because that part utterly confused me.
The one scene in the movie that I really did like was the fight with Medusa. Not only was the director actually able to balance the action scenes right, but the character of Medusa was really fun to watch. Other than that, there really wasn't anything else in the movie that grasped my attention that well. A lot of the scenes were directed poorly and some of them served absolutely no purpose. And some characters are treated the same way. There are two characters who--I think--were meant to be our comedy relief. But they get hardly any screen time, leave halfway through the movie, and make one 4 second appearance toward the end of the film, but aren't mentioned after that. They did seem like some vaguely interesting characters, claiming they knew exactly how to kill such creatures as centaurs. I would have liked to get to know more about them, but they're hardly given any time on screen after that.
Clash of the Titans was an interesting experience with some pretty cool visuals, but the direction, acting, screenplay, and characters were so badly conceived that the film ends up leaving no impression of any kind on the audience, except, perhaps, that this was a complete waste of time.
3/10