Wrath of the Titans is the 2012 sequel to Clash of the Titans, directed by Jonathan Liebesman from a screenplay by Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson, with Greg Berlanti sharing the story credit. It runs 99 minutes, its tagline is “Feel the Wrath,” and it is a film in which a great deal happens to people the audience has no reason to care about.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
The Setup
A decade after the first film, Perseus, played by Sam Worthington, is living quietly as a village fisherman and raising his son Helius. The gods, weakened by humanity’s lack of devotion, are losing control of the long-imprisoned Titans and their leader, Kronos. Zeus, played by Liam Neeson, needs his son. Hades, played by Ralph Fiennes, has made a deal he should not have. Perseus picks up the sword again.
The Cast
Neeson and Fiennes are the film’s assets, two great actors playing brothers whose family quarrel has cosmic consequences, and their scenes together are the only ones with any weight. Rosamund Pike plays Andromeda, a warrior queen given little to do. Bill Nighy plays Hephaestus and is the film’s one source of wit, a mad blacksmith god muttering to a mechanical owl. Toby Kebbell plays Agenor, the comic sidekick, and Édgar Ramírez plays Ares, the villain, with a scowl and not much else. Danny Huston, Lily James and John Bell round out a cast that deserved a script.
The Spectacle
The film is a chain of set pieces: a chimera attack on a village, a labyrinth, a giant, a cyclops fight, and a final battle against a Titan made of lava and rock. Some of the creature design is impressive. None of it is connected by a story worth following, and the effects, competent as they are, have the weightless quality of a generation of films that mistook scale for stakes.
Worthington
Worthington is an inert lead. Perseus is a man who does not want to be a hero, and the actor plays that reluctance so thoroughly that he seems not to want to be in the film either. The father-and-son thread with Helius is the movie’s attempt at heart, and it is delivered in exchanges that could have come from any film of its kind.
Where It Falls Short
Almost everywhere. The plot is a fetch quest through Greek mythology with the mythology removed. The dialogue is exposition and shouting. The action is loud without being exciting. The 3D, a selling point at the time, adds nothing. And the film has no idea what to do with the one interesting thing it has, which is the sight of gods dying because nobody prays to them anymore.
The Verdict
Wrath of the Titans is a sequel nobody asked for to a remake nobody loved, and it does not improve on either. Neeson and Fiennes give it two good scenes. The rest is wrath without feeling.
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