False Idols: GODS OF EGYPT

A big, lumbering, gaudy, gold-plated fantasy set in Ancient Egypt, Gods of Egypt is a modest collection of oddball flourishes buried under an explosion of convention and generic effects. It’s idiosyncratic in all the small details, but overblown and undercooked in the broad sweep of its tedious and predictable quest narrative. Behind this eccentric production is Alex Proyas, a director of blockbusters who brings such total commitment to his ideas that you have to admire the force of his personality shining through, no matter what you think of the end results. He’s given us the death-haunted pop Goth The Crow, the sci-fi noir Dark City, the popcorn tech ethicist actioner I, Robot, and the genuinely apocalyptic disaster conspiracy picture Knowing. Those are nothing if not big swings. But they can’t all connect big, hence his latest. Gods of Egypt is his worst, but only because it clearly got away from everyone involved, a mess of ideas and impulses at which a studio kept throwing money when a comprehensive rewrite would’ve been a better idea.

The film finds Egypt ruled by its Gods, towering gold-blooded giants who demand the praise and obedience of their small, humble mortal subjects. Lazy Horus (Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is about to ascend to the throne when his Uncle Set (300’s Gerard Butler) takes the crown for himself. To add injury to insult, Set plucks out Horus’ diamond eyes and locks them in a vault. This casts the land into a villainous darkness that should be familiar to anyone who has seen this sort of thing before. The plot proper kicks off when a spirited human thief (Brenton Thwaites, playing the thin, pretty, bland hero) makes a deal with Horus. If he gets the God his eyes, then the God must find a way to save the poor boy’s grievously wounded One True Love (Courtney Eaton in gowns cut for maximum cleavage) from the clutches of the underworld. That’s all pro forma fantasy nonsense. The real glorious goofiness is in the details.

This is a movie in which a bald Geoffrey Rush pulls the sun across the flat Earth’s sky in a boat floating above the atmosphere, stopping periodically to do battle with a ginormous space worm. It features magic immortals who can turn into grotesque cartoony animals or extrude armored plates from their skin like Egyptian Transformers. It has Chadwick Boseman as an egotistical know-it-all God who clones himself a hundred times over, and Elodie Yung as a Goddess who can find anyone with magic sand, provided her magic bracelet keeps her literal demons at bay. There are waterfalls from outer space, Rubik cube pyramid puzzles, a crumbling sentient Sphinx, a flying chariot pulled by giant scarabs, and a days-long line of deceased souls ready to blissfully commune with a pulsing energy they call the afterlife. This is all pleasantly straight-faced odd, a mix between high fantasy and low cornball camp. Proyas takes the mythology just seriously enough, and stages some fun sequences, like two massive fire-breathing snakes attacking our heroes, or thundering fisticuffs atop a 2,000-cubit high obelisk.

But the screenplay by Dracula Untold’s Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless makes a miscalculation in becoming one of those fantasy stories that spends more time filling us in on its rules, caveats, backstory, prophecies, curses, and other assorted gobs of tedious exposition than in actually running through its main story. As a result the brightly lit movie feels endless and consequence free, since the magic is arbitrary and prone to change (with laborious explanation) if the next scene calls for it. There’s no weight. Add to this a feeling of a salvage job, with mismatched scenes, awkward jumps in logic, and plot holes papered over with afterthought narration and incessant tin-eared exposition, and the whole thing starts giving off a whiff of sloppiness. I mean, this is an Egyptology fantasy with a cast of Brits, Americans, Danes, Aussies, anyone but an actual Egyptian. (Butler’s brogue has to be the least fitting Cairo speaking voice since Edward G. Robinson’s in The Ten Commandments.) This is a clearly a movie that’s the product of an interesting directorial imagination hobbled by more than a few unfortunate decisions. 

Who You Gonna Call: THE LAST WITCH HUNTER

The Last Witch Hunter has wild ideas hidden in generic trappings. It features a gleefully nonsensical plot, a mysterious original(ish) concoction of mythology, and plenty of striking fantasy horror imagery. It starts in a murky distant past where men wielding flaming swords clash with shape-shifting witches in the cavernous roots of a massive dark tree that we learn is the source of the Black Plague. Then, we skip forward 800 years into the future – our time – to find the one remaining Witch Hunter. The dying Witch Queen cursed him with immortality, and so he has spent his centuries resigned to hunting down the evil witches and warlocks making the world a worse place. He does so under the careful watch of a supernatural council hidden in the bowels of a New York cathedral, the better for his Catholic priest assistants to help him. All that’s wonderfully ridiculous, and refreshingly nutty, but it moves in heaving clunks of bland thriller mechanics and endless expository dialogue.

The Witch Hunter is Kaulder (Vin Diesel), a towering bald tough guy who swaggers around showing magic users what’s what. There’s a scene in which he enters an underground bar for magic people and they preemptively flee. The owner (Rose Leslie) lets him know that her kind view him as a genocidal fascist, which, considering the whole single-mindedly hunting their kind for centuries, seems like a fair enough label. Still, we’re to understand Kaulder is a kindhearted guy out to indefinitely imprison only bad witches. That’s nice. He’s soulfully mourning his mortality by staring off into space, hiding his psychic wounds behind a jaded exterior. His priest chaperone (Michael Caine) chastises him for always running late. “Time works differently for me,” he rumbles. Diesel has commitment, and investment in the loopy ins and outs that helps bring some reverence to the ridiculous.

Caine’s priest tells us plenty about the history of the Ax and Cross, a secret order of Catholic officials who have passed the Witch Hunting legacy down one at a time for centuries. A new, younger one (Elijah Wood) is waiting in the wings. The movie starts to shape up like a buddy cop movie in a conspiratorial cultish underground monster movie mode, investigating, say, a blind warlock (Isaach De Bankolé) whose butterfly-infested bakery uses mind-altering grubs in the dough. Soon, though, they learn the long-dead Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht) has minions (like Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) plotting to revive her and take over the world with her Plague once more. This leads to one of the movie’s best moments, where the camera pushes in on a character who has put two and two together and murmurs the one place that has enough dark power to restore this dormant evil to full life: Witch Jail.

It’s a race through dream spaces and nightmarish hallucinations to find the MacGuffins necessary to restore order to the world and stave off a malevolent resurrection. The main problem is Kaulder’s memory, though it is totally understandable that he can’t remember a crucial detail from 800 years prior and thus must hunt down a spell that’ll restore him. He teams up with the bar-owning witch and his priests to walk around explaining the rules of the magic, the monsters they encounter, ancient curse antidotes they need, right when each new factor appears. Sure, there are swordfights and spells cast and glowing doodads flipped around. But mostly those involved make sure to thoroughly explain what they’re about to do, and then, once done, explain what they just did. And even then I still didn’t really understand every detail.

It’d be more fun if the screenplay by Cory Goodman (Priest) and Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (Dracula Untold) would let its characters shut up for a second, take a deep breath, and be more than exposition spigots, because director Breck Eisner (Sahara) does a credible job selling the outlandish ideas visually. When a sorceress uses a necklace to awaken a tree monster, it’s not hard to figure out the causal relationship. And when a sword impaling one character causes pain in another, the connection is clear. We don’t necessarily need people tiresomely expounding. Just move along. Show us cool things. I liked the Witch Queen’s look: like a life-size woodcarving brought to life, with a mop of greasy spaghetti hair and a thick brain stem braid. It’s icky and creepy. And when she’s dead (the first time) she looks like burnt firewood. It’s all the better for remaining mysterious, unexplained. This is a movie about deep, dark magic threatening to burst forth from underneath the surface of modernity, and instead of urgency or menace, it’s just neat to look at.

Sad Vlad: DRACULA UNTOLD

Do audiences really enjoy seeing movies about famous characters in which little of what makes said characters famous appears? We’ve been living with the glum and ponderous self-serious “gritty reboot” for at least decade now. We’ve had a mortal Hercules, a non-journalist Man of Steel, a Robin Hood without his Merry Men, and a King Arthur without a roundtable or a wizard. That it works marginally well about half the time is probably why they keep coming. Now we can add Dracula to the pile of iconic figures stripped of some iconic ideas.

We have Luke Evans, previously a Musketeer for Paul W.S. Anderson and a Middle-Earthling for Peter Jackson, playing the famous vampire in Dracula Untold, except he’s not a vampire and would rather not drink blood, thank you very much. He’s really Vlad the Impaler, so named for impaling his enemies and leaving them stuck in the battlefield on spears, the better to intimidate his enemies. We see this sight a few times, but silhouetted and shrouded in fog, the better to maintain a PG-13. Vlad was a real historical figure, and the movie tries for some token amount of Dark Age verisimilitude. It looks muddy, people are poor, and Vlad’s head weighs heavy with worry that Turks will bother his Transylvanian kingdom so peaceful he doesn’t even bother having a standing army.

But, sure enough, Turks, led by their villainous king (Dominic Cooper), show up demanding 1,000 boys for their army. When Vlad refuses, the Turks demand 1,000 and one more, his son (Art Parkinson). Vlad kills the messengers and prepares for battle, promising his wife (Sarah Gadon) he’ll do anything to protect their family and citizens. Anything, in this case, involves climbing an impassably craggy cliff to a cave where a vampire (Charles Dance) lives. Here the pale, fanged beast – more Nosferatu than Lee or Lugosi – offers Vlad a deal. Drink some vampire blood and have the powers of one for three days. If he makes it to a third sunrise without succumbing to the desire for human blood, he’ll return to normal. Drink, and he’ll be a vampire forever. He makes the deal.

At first this is all rather deftly handled, historical portent and creepy legend freely mixing in a dumb fun sort of way. It seems poised to be something like David Lean epic meets Hammer horror. Instead, it ends up closer to a Peter Jackson knockoff with long shots of characters wandering over hills and CGI armies marching across fields, the better to pad out the runtime I suppose. Characters are barely fleshed out, worldbuilding is half-hearted at best, and the production design is cramped and dark, the better to keep costs down I suppose. All the while, vampirism is exploited for effects shots and atmosphere, but is served up as a choose-your-own-metaphor. Sacrifice, temptation, grief, power, take your pick. It’s a painfully thin script telling a simple story with woefully underdeveloped motivations and undercooked characterizations. Gadon and Dance, especially, are wasted in one-note roles that start intriguing and go nowhere fast.

And yet, there’s potential here, and it’s the actors and art directors who get close to finding it with the sturdy competence of first-time director Gary Shore and no help from screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. Evans’ Vlad is a sad dad who’s just protecting his family, and we can see the pain of the responsibility in his eyes, as well as the exhilaration of vampiric powers that allow him to take on the entire Turkish army single-handedly. He can heal from his wounds – save sunlight, or a stake in the heart – and see in the dark, control creatures of the night, and turn into a swarm of bats if he moves really fast. He’s intimidating his enemies but he’s scaring his people and, hoo boy, does he vant to suck some blood. There’s a dollop of tension there, sitting beneath Evans eyes as he poses like a fantasy illustration in armor and flowing red cape. It’s impractical, but looks pretty cool, like most of the action and effects, which swirl around somewhat confusingly, but look striking from time to time.

There are plenty of reasons not to see this movie. But if you go hoping to see an impossibly large flock of bats slam into a massive army like a fist, or a vampire get staked in the heart so forcefully all his skin falls off, or a villain look across a CGI landscape full of ominous storm clouds and lightning and intone, “It’s the prince. He is coming,” you won’t be disappointed. If you get on the right flimsy B-movie fantasy wavelength, it’s not too terrible a way to pass 95 minutes, even better if you leave before the wholly unnecessary tease for a sequel that may or may not ever exist. Dracula Untold barely has enough to it to support itself, let alone a franchise.