Review: Gods of Egypt

Gods of Egypt
Cert: 12A / 127 mins / Dir. Alex Proyas / Trailer



Now, I've complained about the San Miguel advert in another post, I know, but it played again tonight after the trailers and immediately before the film, like some unofficial sponsor of what was to come. 'How is this going to put in a good mood for a movie I'm already half-dreading?'*¹ I thought. Then after five minutes, I saw the thematic link. Gods of Egypt stars Brendon Thwaites and Courtney Eaton as a young, naive couple, and both their mannerisms and delivery are worthy of that San Miguel advert! This was going to be a long night...

Blah, blah, ancient Egypt. Blah, blah gods walking among men. Blah, blah there's a good one and a bad one and they're going to spend two hours chasing each other and fighting through a CGI landscape while an annoying adolescent attempts to crack jokes, and also there's some lady-gods with barely constrained boobies For The Dads*². You know the drill, you've seen it before.

The film's script weaves back and forth between pompous and excruciating, while the visual effects work on a sliding-scale between 'pretty slick' and 'Power Rangers'. From a production-design standpoint, the comparisons to Stargate are inevitable (and undeserved to be fair, given the film's setting), but for those of you into tick-lists, there are some serious visual nods to Clash of the Titans, Watchmen, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Assassins Creed and even John Carter. I'm also fairly certain I saw a carved glyph of the Playboy bunny when Horus is climbing up a tower at one point; a visual gag which gets less funny the more you think about it.

It also didn't escape my attention that the film's conceit of having the 'god' characters appear as scaled-up giants next to the humans is so inconsistently executed that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (god) and Brendon Thwaites (human) miss each other's eyeline for approximately half of their shared scenes, as Brendon appears to be changing size each time he's on-screen.

Accents are a massive bugbear of mine (as regular readers will attest), but given that this story is a) translated into English from whatever ancient Egyptian dialogue would have been used and b) completely fictionalised anyway, the mix of US/UK tones throughout the cast didn't actually bother me at all. I'd have just liked Gerard Butler to pick one. A telling watermark for Butler's films will be the accent he's allowed to use for his dialogue. His better and/or more entertaining flicks feature him with his natural Paisley brogue, whereas the poorer works tend to see him struggling under the weight of Fauxmerican. However, after watching Gods of Egypt in its entirety, I'm still not sure what he was meant to be doing. He rolls a few Rs with that wry smirk of his, but I swear to god(s) he's doing a sort of Italian-Cockney half the time. I think Gerard may actually have forgotten how to be Scottish now, like one of those people who get a bang on the head and start speaking in another language without realising it...

Anyway. As utterly shite as this film is (and it is), at least Gods of Egypt didn't succeed in making me angry, if only because it doesn't seem to be taking itself seriously at all. Although that said, it's not even silly enough to be a decent kids' film.

The really weird thing is that this is all brought to us by Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and Dark City. While neither of those movies are ageing particularly well, they're both incredibly interesting, unique pieces of work. This ancient tale, on the other hand, is timelessly incoherent.

If you were looking for the perfect movie to top off a triple-bill with I, Frankenstein and Jupiter Ascending, Gods of Egypt is for you...

Immortals.
Watch this if you enjoyed Immortals…



No.



No.



No.



Yes.



No.



Level 1: This movie stars Bruce 'Tion Medon' Spence.
And isn't it quite awful that Spence is cast as a decaying Egyptian Pharaoh Zombie, yet is instantly recognisable? Poor bloke…




*¹ It's not that I'd "pre-judged" the movie exactly, but after watching the trailer several times it was pretty fucking difficult to feel enthusiastic about the prospect of two-hours worth...

*² Or indeed for the 14yr olds this film is aimed at, to be fair.


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Other Woman

The Other Woman
Cert: 12A / 109 mins / Dir. Nick Cassavetes




There are a few scenes in the opening act of Nick Cassavetes's new film where an emotionally stunned Leslie Mann ghosts around Greenwich Village with a glassy-eyed layer of disquieting melancholy, bringing to mind the classic work of Woody Allen, and the actress's hyperbolic performance backs this up, suggesting that a revealing, introspective movie may have been mis-sold in the trailer as a raucous Feminist-Lite™ comedy. This is soon forgotten, however, when we get a shot of a dog defecating on an apartment floor, and enough oestrogen-fuelled screeching to make us feel like we're trapped in a lift hurtling in free-fall toward the ground floor, with six different episodes of Loose Women playing on each surface at top volume...

Oh, not all the time, I should add that. But definitely some of the time. The script pulls some of the trailer's punches by having the 'reveal' of Nasty-Cheating-Man*¹ be non-existent, and by letting the whole thing drag on for around 20 minutes too many, but all in all it's reasonably well done. I've seen two of the three leads in far worse, put it that way. Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton do well but seem frustrated in their roles as sassy-litigator and beach-bimbo, respectively, and everyone outside of the main trio of lead characters is purely cardboard; this really is Leslie Mann's film (even if some of her ad-libs do go on for 30 seconds longer than they're funny), and I'd like to see her in something weightier, if only to break her cycle of slighly-below-par-comedies.

The film just about scrapes though the laugh-test, but it'll be undemanding fluff at best, even for its target demographic. You've seen better, but you've seen way worse.

Oh, and it's official, now. Don Johnson and Trevor Eve have become the same swaggering, middle-aged, Blue Stratos wearing Lotharioid-Mechanism…


(Actually, that comparison doesn't really do it justice. You'll have to trust me, they are the same thing, now.)

Considering how much this isn't aimed at me, I found The Other Woman reassuringly watchable, although at the same time it's still thoroughly pedestrian and exactly what I was expecting. Some solid performances bolster a shaky screenplay based on a tried-and-tested premise. Come for Kate Upton; Stay for Leslie Mann.

The trailer's a bit snappier, if anything.



Mostly, but I winced quite a lot, too.



Oh, probably.



This is a £3 DVD and ooh look, the Lambrini's on 2 for £5*².



No.



Not unless it's on at someone's house and I'm feeling too polite*³ to berate them.



There isn't.

I've never seen Nicki Minaj before. No, seriously. Is that actually her for real, or was it a comedic tribute to the late, great Kenny Everett?

*¹ I watched a film about him for almost two hours and I don't know his name. His character was so unmemorable that I don't know his name. No, I won't look it up, why should the writer Melissa Stack get away with it that easily? The leads are Kate, Carly and Amber. He is 'the nasty man'. As opposed to 'the good man', whose name I also can't remember, but he's an incidental decorator, so yeah.
*² Which tells you, I hope, everything I know about Lambrini. If 2-for-£5 is an realistic special-offer price, then I would like to point out that it was complete guesswork on my part. I do look for tramp-deals, but in the brown-beer department. Honest. Your Honour.
*³ Drunk.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.