Gods of Egypt * (2016, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Brenton Thwaites, Chadwick Boseman, Élodie Yung, Courtney Eaton, Rufus Sewell, Gerard Butler, Geoffrey Rush) – Movie Review

So the simple version of this mystifying story is this. Young thief Bek (Brenton Thwaites), whose true love Zaya (Courtney Eaton) is killed, seeks the aid of the powerful god Horus ( Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to get her back from the dead and also to defeat merciless god of darkness Set (Gerard Butler), who has taken over the throne of Egypt.

Directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow), and written by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, this is a puzzlingly bad film that, for all its surface flash and air of expected excitement, ends up really rather boring and uninteresting most of the time. Just when you think it is beginning to spark up, along comes some savage editing and cutting to destroy the mood and the tension. It is one of those movies that has started with lots of good ideas and intentions but has just gone awry along the way. The longer it proceeds, the clearer that is, though it does rally for a bit of a big finish.

The bare bones of the plot may be clear but somehow the movie is muddled and hard to follow. The soulless, endless, non-stop CGI splattered all over it is another big problem. There’s so much CGI that any idea of scale and humanity – we’re supposed to be in a real Egypt visited by the huge gods who created it – has gone out of the window. It’s not that the film looks bad, quite the contrary, it’s just that it is bad. Some bad acting is another big problem. It’s not there are any bad actors, quite the contrary, it’s just that they acting badly.

Thwaites looks the part but can’t speak it as he’s stuck with some weird English accent (I think). Nobody obviously told Butler that everybody was supposed to be sounding English (though I suppose gods can be Scots too) or that he should try a performance that isn’t his 300 turn. And Coster-Waldau just never hits his stride, hits his mark, or hits the right tone, and, above all, never establishes any rapport with his film sidekick Thwaites. Yes, it of course fails in its mortal-god buddy-buddy movie thing, an idea unsurprisingly defeating both actors.

Oscar-winning Geoffrey Rush overeggs the pudding and ends up with egg on his face as fiery grandpa Ra, Bryan Brown tries to get by sleepwalking through his role as Osiris, Rufus Sewell gives a strange and uncomfortable performance as creepy head architect Urshu and Chadwick Boseman is camp and embarrassing as Thoth.

Elodie Yung looks gorgeous but puzzled as Hathor, goddess of love, and Horus’s lover, snatched by Set. I have to say game, Set and match here, I think, though, if the name Set is daft, it is much more unfortunate that the hero is called Horus, and that everyone is saying ‘whore-us’. Why didn’t they go for ‘horace’, as in the poet?  Nevertheless, though I was hoping for the odd snigger, no others arose from this deadly serious fantasy. And that’s the problem. Where’s the fun? Where’s the entertainment? I don’t think it’s ever going to be seen as funny or engagingly daft enough to be a cult movie, like Land of the Pharaohs (1955).

Arguably, some good battles perhaps save it – notable with Bek and Horus battling a pair of beauties, Astarte (Abbey Lee) and Anat (Yaya Deng) on giant fire-breathing serpents, and the final Horus-Set -, er, set piece, battling to the death above the film’s crucial monolith. It’s a pity, then, that both these sequences come late in the day.

American studio Summit Entertainment filmed in Australia, getting a government tax credit for 46 per cent of of the film’s huge $140 million production budget, so parent company Lionsgate risked less than $10 million because of the tax incentives and pre-sales. Just as well since the film was a box office failure, grossing $142 million worldwide (only $31 million in North America).

Lionsgate and Proyas responded to criticism for its predominantly white cast playing Egyptian deities by apologising for ethnically inaccurate casting.

Proyas responded to adverse reviews by calling critics ‘diseased vultures pecking at the bones of a dying carcass, trying to peck to the rhythm of the consensus. I applaud any film-goer who values their own opinion enough to not base it on what the pack-mentality says is good or bad.’

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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