Neeson Month: Mini Review - Wrath of the Titans

It’s Neeson Month

And today we look at the sequel to my previous Neeson Month review Wrath of the Titans

Critics were no kinder to this movie than they were the last, holding a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences were less kind and this movie $305m on a $150m budget, in real terms they’ll be lucky if they broke even on that. Why was this movie the final straw? Here are my thoughts.

Perseus lives as a fisherman with his son, Helius after the death of Io, so glad she was brought back to life at the end of the first movie only to die before we see her again, that’s good writing there. But the Greek Gods are becoming mortal and dying and when they do, the gates to Tartarus will open and unleash Kronos.

But as usual there’s trickery among the gods as Zeus’ jealous son Ares has conspired with Hades to unleash Kronos using Zeus’ power to retain their immortality. It’s up to Perseus, Agenor, and Queen Andromeda to free Zeus and stop this evil from rising.

OK, this movie has some improvements over the first one. First, because Perseus is already an established fighter, they get into the action quickly, although again the editor can’t linger on a shot for more than a second so most fights are incomprehensible.

Also, Ralph Fiennes has refined his performance as Hades, he whispers far fewer of his lines so he doesn’t sound like a knock-off Voldemort anymore. Queen Andromeda is given more to do than be the bargaining chip she was in the last movie, she’s portrayed here by Rosamund Pike (who’s shown up twice before in Jack Reacher and What we did on our holiday) thanks to a scheduling conflict. But yeah, she’s actually in the action rather than a footnote in the movie.

On the other hand, there are bigger problems, whilst Hades manipulation in the first movie was done for interesting reasons we get the most boring kind of motivation possible for Ares, jealousy. Yeah, I mentioned, he’s jealous of Perseus getting all the attention and my problem is it comes off as incredibly petty.

Secondly, and this is quite a substantial plot-hole, why the hell is Hades dying in this movie? They established in the last one that he’s capable of surviving off people’s fear, the climax to this movie is a generic fire monster that’s likely to scare the sh*t out of people. Why did he team up with Zeus to defeat it, it’s basically doing what the Kraken did in the last movie? Even if it was because it was out of his control, why did he lose his immortality, that makes no sense!

Neeson’s performance isn’t great either, sad to say. His monotone acting is rather bland in this movie and is detrimental to the performance. Sam Worthington is passable in this movie, he still has the generic growl though.

Helius, is largely pointless, he serves as the new bargaining chip and is absent throughout most of the movie.

Then there’s the ending and all I have to say is why? What’s going on? Why can’t they go back? There’s no explanation for their words, just trailer fodder lines.

This movie might have some improvements over the first, but it’s not enough, the script is worse and the villain is weak.

Rating 40/100