‘The Clash Of The Titans’ remake limped past that magic $$$ mark, thanks to idiots like me who paid extra to watch it in ground breakingly shit 3D that was so badly converted it was difficult to decipher which hair belonged to which character. Because of this, the fine people at Warner Brothers concluded that the world was desperate to see Sam Worthington and his robotic Owl do some more questing, and ‘Wrath Of The Titans’, the most unwanted sequel since ‘Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous’, was born. So of course I went to see it. And of course it wasn’t very good.

A bunch of things happen in this movie, but I’m not sure you could call it a plot. Perseus now has a dead wife and weedy teenaged son. His Dad, Zeus, played by Liam Neeson, gets betrayed by his other son and trapped by his brother, Hades, who is played by Ralph Fiennes. I had totally forgotten Fiennes was in the first one. Imagine how sad he was when he learnt they were making a sequel and he was contractually obligated to appear in it. Poor Ralph Fiennes. Anyway, Hades is going to release their Dad (this family tree is more complex than the Coppolas) who is some kind of humongous volcano man trapped in a mountain, so Perseus has to save the day. There is also a giant, a flying horse and the Minotaur.

The man behind this is Johnathon Liebsman, who committed (directed doesn’t seem to be the right word) the prequel to the remake of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, as well as last years dreadful ‘Battle LA’. His track record didn’t bode well, but to his credit he doesn’t do such a bad job with this film. Most of what is wrong with it isn’t his fault. It’s a nice enough movie to look at. The visuals are, at times, extraordinary. There is some nice camera work, and I was shocked to find that the 3D was done really well. There just isn’t anything else. While the editors have heroically managed to assemble the scenes in chronological order, there is no structure or rhythm; there’s just a bunch of stuff that happens between the monsters showing up.

The plot is an afterthought, and the characters are paper thin. You can see these really very good actors trying hard to invest them with something, but the movie is far more interested in throwing some, admittedly good looking, giant cartoon beasts at them. So, in summary, if all you are interested in is pure spectacle then you will find it with ‘Wrath of the Titans’, but you will also find it microwaving a can of coke.