Demigods and Monsters: PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS

The quickest way to communicate the feeling of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is to call it a Harry Potter film with half the budget, simpler plotting, less investment in nuanced characters, and on a smaller scale. The second in a popular series of children’s novels by the amiable Rick Riordan, this movie follows 2010’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in adapting the adventures of Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman), demigod son of Poseidon, student at Camp Half-Blood, and the Chosen One of the story’s mythology. Circumstances conspire to send him off on adventures to save their magical world with the help of his two friends, a scared-but-courageous boy (Brandon T. Jackson) and a bookish, intelligent girl (Alexandra Daddario). (Sound familiar?) This movie finds Jackson on a quest that leads a group of his demigod friends into contact with a small collection of appealingly fake CGI monsters including a clockwork bull, a furry cat thing with a scorpion tail, and a deep sea Sarlacc, among others. We only see one at a time, of course. They don’t have Harry Potter money to spend.

There is nothing so wrong with Sea of Monsters that I can’t say they didn’t try, but there’s nothing so right that it’s easy to like. It certainly brings the monsters, bland and unconvincing though they are. The plot puts Camp Half-Blood, which is visually uninspired and feels as interesting and tiny an environment as an especially modest summer camp, in danger after Luke (Jake Abel), a villain from the previous feature, breaks through a magical protective force field by poisoning the tree from which it emanates. The leader of the camp (Anthony Stewart Head taking over for Pierce Brosnan as the top half of a centaur) decides to send the best demigod student (Leven Rambin) after the Golden Fleece, which we’re told will heal the tree. But Percy’s clued into a prophecy that makes him think he should be the one to find it, so off our main characters go – new character, a teen Cyclops (Douglas Smith), in tow – traipsing through simple secondary quests (find this God, use that Olympian object, escape this trap) that eventually lead them into combat over the object they so desperately need. Along the way, they’re constantly explaining Greek mythology to each other. You’d think these demigods would’ve learned something about it at that camp, but at least one of them has an app for that.

The movie is standard derivative fantasy creature feature stuff, but it’s all so chintzy, simplistic, and flatly expositional that it was hard for me to find much of a reason to get invested in the fantastical (but sadly none too fantastic) happenings unfolding on screen. I appreciated director Thor Freudenthal (of Hotel for Dogs and the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie) taking such a brightly colored approach with calm camera work and unashamed embrace of the material’s cornball, bargain basement blockbuster mythos. I mean, someone has to be making this generation’s Beastmaster or something, right? The kids around me in the surprisingly packed showing last night seemed to enjoy themselves, some gasping in recognition at characters I barely recognized from the first film and giggling at some of the mildly amusing one-liners. There was even one kid who loudly exclaimed “It’s Castle!” when Nathan Fillion turned up in one scene playing Hermes. Fillion’s always a delight, here even getting a slightly amusing wink to his cult classic TV show Firefly’s gone-too-soon status, but he’s out of the picture before you can say “cameo.”

Speaking of welcome presences, Stanley Tucci pops up as a sad and distracted Dionysus who speaks exposition and has the kind of not-as-witty-as-the-screenplay-thinks dialogue that only someone like Stanley Tucci could make palatable. But that’s also a role that only floats around the margins of the movie. For the most part, we’re stuck with the talented young actors in half-convincing scenes of Gods and monsters. As written by screenwriter Marc Guggenheim, they are nothing parts, simply one-note characterizations: conflicted hero, comedic relief, sympathetic tag-along, smarty-pants, good-hearted rival, wise mentor, and snarling villain. (Maybe the books, unread by me, are better in that regard.) It doesn’t help that someone left a lot of dead air around every line reading, as if the characters are patiently waiting for each other to stop talking before chiming in. Even an early scene in which one character interrupts another feels off. No one on screen seems to display much energy or enthusiasm, but maybe I was just projecting my own feelings on that point. I went into this sequel neither resenting nor remembering much about Percy Jackson the first and left in much the same state of mind about the second.

Nothing New Under the Sun: PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is the biggest hunk of indigestible, derivative fantasy-adaptation nonsense to hit the big screen since Eragon. That film played like a teenager got tired of having to watch both The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and decided to just mush them together. If you know anything about the creation of that aberration, then you know that that’s pretty much how it happened. Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is a blatant Harry Potter rip-off based on a book by Rick Riordan that’s slightly better than the movie would have you think. Instead of a young boy with special powers discovering a world of wizards and Hogwarts in Europe, here we have a boy with special powers discovering a world of Greek gods and Camp Half-Blood in America. I guess it makes a certain kind of twisted Hollywood sense that Chris Columbus, director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, got hired to direct this movie.

If nothing else, the existence of this movie confirms my suspicions that the first two Potter films succeed in spite of, not because of, their director. Take away the great source material, good scripts, excellent art direction, wonderful cinematography, and fun visual effects and there’s not a whole lot for a movie to stand on. Such is the case of Percy Jackson, although, to be fair, Harry Potter doesn’t have a montage set to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” You win some, you lose some.

Everything about this film seems priced at a lower level and pitched at the undiscerning. Sure, it doesn’t have great source material, but that’s no reason for Craig Titley’s script to contain dialogue that calls into question whether or not he’s actually heard human beings interact. With plenty of howlingly clunky lines, it often undermines the fairly impressive cast. In fact, it’s the cast that starts the movie on a good note. As the opening credits started, I had to smile seeing likable actor after likable actor listed. Once the movie proper started my smile slowly faded.

Logan Lerman is cast as Percy Jackson, a teenager who is unaware that his deadbeat dad is none other than Poseidon, god of the sea. Now, Lerman’s a promising young actor. He held his own on the screen with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in James Mangold’s very enjoyable 3:10 to Yuma remake a few years ago. But here, he’s not given much to do other than pose heroically or act as an audience for characters who are delivering exposition. But, at 18, he’s the youngest teenager in the cast, so he looks the part, at least. His fellow teenagers are a different story. As his sidekicks, Brandon T. Jackson (25, memorably seen as one of the hilarious cast of Tropic Thunder) and Alexandra Daddario (23, in her first major role) are capable but out-of-place playing the Ron and Hermione roles, respectively. It doesn’t help that they have the same lame dialogue as everyone else.

The script also does no favors to the adult cast performing as various mythical creatures and mythological characters. Pierce Brosnan is a centaur and head of Camp Half-Blood and he never fails to look ridiculous wearing half a CGI horse. Catherine Keener, fresh off of playing Max’s mother in the transcendent Where the Wild Things Are, puts in her time in the thankless role of Percy’s mother, wearing for the entirety of her screen time a look of desperation that only sets in when an actor’s paycheck vastly outweighs their understanding of ridiculous material. It’s nice to see Uma Thurman as Medusa, but the inspiration stops there. It’s also nice to Joe Pantoliano in two brief scenes, as Percy’s stepfather. He might have the most thankless role of the film, even including Sean Bean’s Zeus whose lines could be counted on your fingers.

Explaining the characters and actors in that manner might have seemed a little dull and clunky, but it’s a perfect emulation of the way the movie works, shuffling a character on screen just long enough for them to impact the plot, but just quickly enough so that no one character can leave much of an impact on the audience. This is the kind of movie that can barely keep its own plot straight and is therefore constantly informing us about what’s going on. The movie’s so generous with the exposition that nearly every character gets to spout some. I’m a little surprised there isn’t someone talking over the end credits, still explaining while the audience is out the door.

The movie sparks to life on occasion, like in a briefly enjoyable Vegas escape, but those moments are all too brief. Most of the movie is consumed with a tedious video game style of plot development wherein the characters repeatedly move to a new location, find a trinket, and battle something. There’s terrible dialogue and endless exposition around every corner, or, even worse, overly obvious music cues. Hey, our three protagonists are on their way to the underworld to confront Hades or to find something or other. Start up “Highway to Hell.”

Funnily enough, once they do reach the underworld, the movie reaches its greatest portion of sustained inspiration. The effects and design are fairly striking, as are the performances from Steve Coogan and Rosario Dawson, as Hades and Persephone, who play their gods as glam-rock egoists while pronouncing every line with just the right amount of bemusement. This good will carries into a modestly likable airborne swordfight amidst the rooftops of New York that brings a much needed energy boost. But even this late save doesn’t stop the thoroughly mediocre nature of the movie. It’s clunky, episodic, and lame. It goes by fast enough with a nice enough cast, but pacing and casting can only carry a movie so far before the production needs to keep up its end of the bargain.

Percy Jackson isn’t exactly disappointing because it’s not very good. It’s mostly disappointing because it’s subpar in entirely uninteresting and unsurprising ways. The biggest surprise of the movie is that it’s actually not terrible, just frustratingly mediocre and fatally confused.