DIRECTOR: Thor Freudenthal
CAST: Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Leven Rambin, Jake Abel, Stanley Tucci, Nathan Fillion, Douglas Smith, Paloma Kwiatkowski, Anthony Head, Robert Maillet, Derek Mears, Missi Pyle, Yvette Nicole Brown, Mary Birdsong
RUNNING TIME: 107 mins
CERTIFICATE: PG
BASICALLY… Percy Jackson (Lerman), the human son of the Greek god Poseidon, must venture with his friends to find the fabled Golden Fleece in the Sea of Monsters, in order to save their secluded sanctuary…
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NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
Of all the Harry Potter knockoffs in this world, perhaps the dullest out of all of them is Percy Jackson, which is basically the story of Harry Potter with Greek mythology thrown in for good measure because… just because.
As if the first one wasn’t boring enough, they seem to have somehow made the sequel, usually when they learn their mistakes from the first one and try not to repeat them again, even more so than last time. In fact you’d be surprised that they didn’t just change the name to Percy Boredom while they were at it. Or Wristwatch: The Movie, since that’s all you’d be watching half the time.
But why IS this film not even worth 99p in a petrol station, you may ask?
Aside from the fact that it’s a thinly disguised clone of The Boy Who Lived – think about it, a young boy with sort-of magical powers attends a secluded piece of land where he is educated to use these powers for good by eccentric teachers and his best friends including a male comedy relief and a much smarter girl? The sound you’re currently hearing is the phone ringing in Rowling’s lawyer’s office – it has characters who fail to pull you in to the drama and action, even though they all do rather well considering the material they’ve been given, and a story that is always constantly on the move but severely let down by a terrible script. You nearly forget why they’re on the quest to begin with until they revisit it at the end of the film. Its shoddiness in the writing can also be seen in its attempts to create a running gag, in this case the “wrong-name” gag where somebody keeps getting someone else’s name wrong and expects the audience to laugh every time at the HIGH-LARITY of the situation. Most successful running gags only limit themselves to about three uses at the most, but here they use it at least TEN TIMES in the space of a FEW MINUTES. It’s not just overkill, it’s severe laziness.
Not to mention that everything in this movie, from the visual effects right down to the lame-as-hell resolutions feels truly and utterly FAKE. There is a scene near the beginning of the film featuring a gigantic metal bull that looks so unreal and completely like the work of computer graphics that it gives the actors a near impossible task to convince us that it’s real. Add to that some rather distracting green screen effects, and you have the work of some incompetent visual effects artists. As for the aforementioned resolutions, something happens to someone near the end but the way they overstep these consequences is insultingly simple and destroys any decent drama the movie could have concocted.
Although, credit where credit’s due – as before, the actors do well despite their material, and the film has some enjoyably quirky moments such as the Eyeless Drivers in a New York taxi (again, not unlike the Knight Bus scene in that other fantasy franchise). But they are so far and few in between, and they do little to lighten what is already a darkly-lit and dreary attempt at continuing a film series, one that suffers from a great case of identity crisis. It never knows if it’s trying to make a funny, light-hearted family movie or a more serious, grown-up action-adventure type of film. Either way, it fails at both.
SO, TO SUM UP…
If you are looking around for a decent film to watch, don’t even bother with Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. Piled on with a lazy script, poor visuals, a dull storyline and an overbearing sense of over-familiarity, it’s a mess of a Harry Potter knock-off. Just pick something more light-hearted to keep you entertained – it sure as hell must beat this rubbish!
