I’m the sort of person who can once in a while find a strange sort of beauty in a truly brainless action movie that’s aware of how stupid it is. This elevates ordinary crappy popcorn flicks from being just crappy popcorn flicks into the Promised Land of So Bad It’s Good. Clash of the Titans, against all odds, is not even So Bad It’s Good. I say against all odds because the original Clash featured a golden robo-owl and stop-motion monsters and Laurence Olivier as Zeus with frickin’ lasers emerging from his head. It’s begging to be made even more ridiculous with the aid of modern technology. And yet, director Louis Leterrier, best known for his other parade of lost chances to be ridiculous The Incredible Hulk, takes the movie seriously. I don’t know how he did it either.

Let’s start with all the opportunities the movie had to be elevated from Hollywood trying and failing to do highbrow Greek mythology as an action movie to Hollywood saying “fuck it” and putting whatever looks the most awesome together into a truly magical mashup of robo-owls and LaserZeus. The movie stars Liam Neeson as Zeus. OK, we have a world-renowned, Academy Award-winning actor of the stage and screen as the king of the gods. This looks promising. Ralph Fiennes as Hades. Alright, we have a guy who’s really good at playing villains who just want to kill everyone (especially Jews and Harry Potter) playing what Hollywood thinks Hades is like. Also, he played the antagonist in a very well-known film starring Liam Neeson. It’s like old rivals together again at last. I came in expecting Voldemort and Qui-Gon Jinn duking it out on a massive scale. The money line used in the trailer is “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!”. Now we’re talking! Giant sea monsters with razor-sharp teeth that will drag anyone other than Sam Worthington to the depths of the CGI sea! And said giant sea monster is controlled by Liam Neeson-Zeus! This being Ancient Greece, there are also plenty of nubile girls in gossamer chitons begging to be ripped off by Sam Worthington or other manly Greek men who are all wearing the skimpiest tunics the ratings will allow. Awesome.

But not awesome, because at every opportunity, Leterrier tries to be Serious. This is a serious exploration of fate, the gods, and why Zeus wants your love, LAHV, LAHV, LAHV. And nothing is sadder than the actors taking it just as seriously as their fearless director. Sam Worthington, this time acting in his natural Australian accent (which makes no sense, but who am I to point this out in a movie that involves a guy whose blood turns into giant scorpions?) has an endearing earnestness as he slogs through lines like “I knew one great man in my life. That was my father. Now I know four”. But even when he’s not straining to maintain an American accent, as he was in his previous films Terminator Salvation and Avatar, Worthington is still stilted and wooden. He has moments of charm, which puts him a few pegs above Hayden Christensen, but if only his acting skills were as developed as his impressive pectoral muscles. The only one having any fun in this whole thing is Liam Neeson, who is having a grand old time hamming it up as the king of the gods; winking as he bangs a mortal ruler’s wife, shouting and slamming his impressive staff on the CGI floor of the palace on Mount Olympus, and having control over a Kraken. He knows what this movie could have been, and figures he might as well adhere to the Brian Blessed School of Acting and give the least nuanced and subtle performance possible. I would go so far as to say that the only reason this movie is barely worth watching is Liam Neeson.

I suppose you’re all wondering about that Kraken that the trailer was trumpeting so much. Indeed it is released, but the trailers overhyped it so much that it’s just underwhelming. In fact, it didn’t even whelm. Sure, there was a big many-toothed, many-tentacled sea monster that threatened to eat the hot Greek (actually Ethiopian in the myth, but this is Hollywood, my friends) princess Andromeda, and he was vanquished by Sam Worthington, and it was pretty good CGI, but it was so little payoff for so much buildup. If you’re going to be throwing Liam Neeson in sparkly god-armor and a positively memetic one-liner at me in the trailer over and over, you’d better give me a freaking awesome climactic monster that practically rips space and time asunder. Instead, Louis Leterrier, the master of meh, makes a KRAKEN bland and anti-climactic. Perhaps this makes him the genius of our time, because making an awe-inspiring Eldritch Horror that is at the beck and call of the mightiest beings in the universe into a yawn-inspiring one-off Big Bad that gets defeated in the span of about ten minutes truly takes talent.

At the risk of being labeled politically incorrect against children with behavioral problems, I seriously think this movie is like a ten-year-old with ADHD’s school project to write a story about Greek mythology. It jumps from one monster encounter to the next with next to zero character development, Perseus easily defeats all the monsters, and I know this is a story featuring gods, but you can see the utterly pointless Dei Ex Machina coming from a mile away. Thus, there’s no suspense. Worthington’s constant expression of dull surprise reflects this almost poetically; oh, look, I just found a lightning sword that’s basically a God Lightsaber in the middle of the forest. I will probably use this at some point. Goody goody gumdrops for me. Oh, here comes a giant blood-scorpion. Oh, drat, it looks like I have to fight the Kraken. Good thing I have my God Lightsaber that I’m suddenly OK with using. In terms of excitement about what’s going on, I’m loath to admit, but Worthington and I are pretty much on the same emotional wavelength.

It’s amazing to me how something with so much potential to be a thrill-filled, mythology gag-laden romp through the myth of Perseus can be reduced to a joyless, perfunctory CGI action movie. One can say that this movie defied my expectations in that it bored me out of my skull; sure I was expecting a remake of Clash of the Titans to fall short of Oscar-worthy, but I was also expecting it to be aware of how cheesy it is, and its even cheesier legacy; I was expecting it to be fun. And through what must have been sheer force of will, Leterrier and Company make Clash of the Titans boring. I don’t mean boring in the sense of a movie that plods on and on with nothing of note happening for the run time, but a movie with no life, no spark to it. Stuff happens, but there’s no reason for us to be emotionally invested in it. The hero is nigh invincible, the battles and conflicts get resolved in five minutes even if they involve all-powerful gods or supernatural monsters, and none of the characters really have any personal obstacles to overcome that make us sympathize with them. It’s loud and flashy, but without the dazzling visuals that could at least somewhat redeem a shaky story line (*cough* Avatar *cough*). It halfheartedly tries to be funny, but it does nothing to mask the director’s attempt to make Clash of the Titans Serious Business. Perhaps Leterrier could take a little advice from Buddha when making his next brain-dead action movie: “The fool who knows he is a fool is wiser than the fool who thinks he is wise”.