'way cooler than the original

Rating: 7/10 (29 September 2010)

I'm glad somebody finally made a cool movie of this. It delivers what the posters for the original promised but audiences didn't get: magic, heroism, and thrills. It's absorbing and exciting--The Scorpion King done like Lord of the Rings--with the most awesome flying horse ever, giant scorpions to make you check under your bed, a Medusa that's both gorgeous and creepy, and classy English actors giving heaps of panache to stirring swashbuckler and Biblical-movie lines. The 11-year-old boy in me, who had wriggled with boredom through the clunky first movie, was glued to the screen for this one (the TV screen, I mean: he and I watched it on DVD), and as far as he was concerned it blew its predecessor out of the water.
But even he got that although it actually is cool it's also trying hard to be cool, which makes it not as cool as if it weren't, and that almost as many things in it don't work as do; notably the Olympian gods, with their extremely peculiar costuming. And he didn't get why it had to be such a mishmash. The director of it did the Transporter movies, which were no deathless classics but were professionally put together; this one looks in places as if it had been run through a food processor. Voiceovers set up the back story at unnecessary and confusing length, yet some of the simplest incidents are never explained. Like, suddenly the whole court of Argos knows that Perseus is Zeus's son, when he doesn't know it himself: why doesn't he, and why do they? The script of the original took considerable liberties with the myth; this one is a free-form improvisation on those liberties, without credit to their author. So whereas movie #1, for once following the myth, ends with Perseus and Andromeda getting together--which is kind of the point of the story--in the remake he goes off with someone else, brought in from another myth. Anything can happen at any time, and often does. (One of the unexpected events is that somewhere during his quest Perseus picks up an Australian accent.)
However, the bottom line is, it works. It's like a party that got out of control: it's a huge mess, and something somebody probably should have put a stop to, but that doesn't make it any less fun.