Review: 'Immortals' is epically underwritten

Film: Immortals (A)
Cast: Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, John Hurt, Freida  Pinto, Stephen Dorff
Director: Tarsem Singh
Rating: **1/2

Immortals tells us the story of Henry Cavill as Theseus, (wholly mortal, not the demigod scion of Poseidon), who must thwart the tyrant Hyperion (Rourke).

Hyperion, enraged with the passive, on-looking nature of Greek divinities, seeks to ravage the world in his mad quest to find and wield the mythical Epirus Bow, an object that which can unleash (no, not Clash of the Titan’s Kraken) the imprisoned Titans from their prison of Mount Tartarus.

The Titans were gods, who, on discovering they could slay other gods, did so and were vanquished and sealed away in a really epic battle a really, really long time ago.

Ostensibly, the gods aren’t exactly wringing their hands and wetting their tunics about Hyperion and how humanity is going to make his stand against him since to interfere in the affairs of mortals is to invite the wrath of their king, Zeus (Evans).

Zeus, however, beats his own system by advicing Theseus since he was a young in the discrete manifestation of an old man (Hurt).

Theseus shares Hyperion’s reservations about the efficacy and intercessory powers of the gods, but he’s valiant and honourable. After getting enslaved by the fiend’s henchmen who slay his mother, he embarks upon a quest of vengeance with Phaedra (Pinto), a virgin oracle and Stavros (Dorff) a rakish thief, who, like all rakish thieves, are obliged to provide comic relief.
 
While sitting through Immortals is no Herculean task, trying to find entertainment in its first half, which weakly sets up the story, is a Sisyphean one. Tarsem Singh, known to be a visual pyrotechnician with his mind-bendingly gorgeous imagery in The Cell and The Fall, performs a commendable task in nailing the look of Classical Greece as imagined by the Renaissance masters.

But no matter how unbelievably eye-gasmic the costumes, the effects and overall design are, even one inflicted with Homeric-level blindness can see that style triumphs over substance like Heracles over the Nemean lion, while the script whose plot and dialogues are woefully typical and unimaginative, ought to have been ripped to shreds, not unlike the beleaguered Orpheus.

While the film puts across the Hellenistic penchant for guts (reasonably well-spewed) and shield-thumping, oath-chanting glory, it doesn’t seem to imbibe its innovations in drama and character development.
 
While Dorff and Evans bring something to their paltry roles, Cavill, who is the next man of steel,  is at times at wooden as the famous gift the Greeks left the Trojans. (This reviewer could go on...) Rourke, who lords over all, in many scenes is like a saturnine professional wrestler who is irked by some cocky newcomer who wants a shot at the upcoming title match.

Arguably the best actor, Hurt, who plays old man Zeus, once played the host of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, which had a Greek myth-based spin-off that this reviewer really wished the film resembled in spirit if not in authenticity.