“Immortals” is a shameless attempt to emulate “300,” right down the jacked, shirtless hero and gory, slow-motion visuals. While the latter movie compensated for its silliness thanks to non-stop action and a ridiculously manly premise, “Immortals” is an excruciatingly unfortunate lesson in how hard it can be to make a good stupid film.
Long ago in ancient Greece, the gods fought a war against the powerful Titans, eventually imprisoning them deep within a mountain. When the brutal King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) sets out to free them and wage war on the gods, the only man who can stop him and save the world is the good-hearted peasant Theseus (Henry Cavill).
In a movie like this, the plot should serve as nothing more than brief dialogue before some extended hacking and slashing. But director Tarsem Singh apparently didn’t get the memo, and he stretches the thin and uninviting storyline so far that there’s surprisingly little time left for the epic bloodbaths and action sequences that people came to see.
The result is a stunningly dull film, and Cavill’s performance as the stock hero/one-man-army/motivational speaker simply can’t save it. He simply doesn’t have the charisma to carry a film, and his pre-battle pump-up speech wouldn’t inspire a flag football team.
When the action does come, it’s all too brief and plagued by a complete inability to foster an interest who dies or how. The best scene in the movie comes when Ares (Daniel Sharman) drops down to Earth from Mount Olympus and doles out a violent ass-whuppin’ with his hammer in a way that would give Thor a run for his money.
“Immortals” is such a tiresome exercise that it might qualify as an affront to the gods. It aims to be an intense action epic, but succeeds only in being epically boring.
