As Exciting and Thrilling as a Two Hour Wrestling Match

Rating: 1/10 (9 August 2012)

I know that Kenneth Branagh is one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of our time. For this reason, I imagine that this film was an experiment on his part. The experiment was to have everybody act as if they were 12 year olds doing their first Junior High Shakespeare play with a gym teacher doing the direction. In others words, have the acting be so awful that there is not one believable line delivered or one scene that is not aimed at the twentieth row in the balcony. Make it so broad that even six years old could not miss every nuance. Since his movies with brilliant acting, like "Othello" did terrible at the box office, his theory was that if he had his actors did the worst possible acting, the movie would be a success. He was right.
Besides the bottom of the barrel acting, there should be a warning label about the writing. Lines like "Magic is just science and science is just magic" are guaranteed to subtract I.Q. points as fast as watching Fox News.
The movie is such a mishmash of clichés from science fiction, comic books superheroes, and Norse mythology, that one is hardly surprised to see a Transformers Robot in the middle of an homage/rip-off of a Scene from Superman II.
The special effects are about on a par with the 1980's children's television series, "The Power Rangers."