ZERO STARS/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Abel
screenplay by Marc Guggenheim, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Thor Freudenthal
by Walter Chaw Say this about Thor Freudenthal and Marc
Guggenheim’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (hereafter PJ2): you’re more than justified in questioning its existence, but at the
end of the day it’s impossible to make something this bad by accident. No, it
takes genuine inspiration to be this tone deaf, to create something that requires intimate knowledge of the source novel or the first film
in this benighted franchise yet will instantly piss off the teenies who love the
Rick Riordan books and the far fewer souls who liked that first
movie. For me, because I love my 9-year-old daughter with all my heart, I
endured PJ2 and only thought about walking out a half-dozen times
before resigning myself to the murky 3-D and even murkier execution. Yes, it’s awful,
that much is to be expected, but that it’s significantly worse than a
movie that was already terrible by nearly every objective standard is really some
kind of accomplishment. At the end of the day, when a 9-year-old articulates
that what’s wrong with the film is that they took out all the relationship
stuff, cherry-picked crap from other novels to contrive a half-assed
cliffhanger for a sequel that will likely never happen, and basically fumbled the promise of the title, well…at least PJ2 can claim the
distinction of awakening the critical facility in a child who, before this, thought every movie was pretty good.
For the uninitiated, Percy (adorable Logan
Lerman) is “Perseus” of Greek-myth fame: son of Poseidon, and saver
of the universe in the previous instalment. In this sequel, he’s asked
to save the universe. His cohorts are comely Annabeth (adorable Alexandra
Daddario), loyal African-American sidekick/satyr Grover (Brandon T. Jackson),
and introducing Percy’s half-brother Tyson (adorable Douglas Smith), a cyclops
all the other freaks in the film somehow find it in their hearts to hate for being
different. Their mission, and they choose to accept it, is to travel to the
Bermuda Triangle (a.k.a. the “sea of monsters”), where they encounter
a bastardization of the Charybdis from The Odyssey; Polyphemus (Robert
Maillet), bastardized from The Odyssey as well; and Titan Cronos in the Ark of
the Covenant from some bullshit children’s author who made a fortune fusing
Edith Hamilton with Judy Bloom. It’s the Scholastic version of Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies, for what it’s worth. Not content, by the way, to
have the Stepin Fetchit character be literally half-goat, they devise a
reason for him in this one to dress up in a maid’s outfit. At least he’s not
threatened with hilarious rape as he was last time around.
The moral of the story, such as it is, is
that family is important and, um, appearances are skin deep, I think. The plot
is disjointed, barely a narrative at all so much as a series of things
that happen in a roughly linear fashion. Linearity isn’t a prerequisite, of course, but PJ2 is also not non-linear enough to be artful. It’s just, you know, a
failure on all counts. Consider a manic ride in a New York yellow cab piloted
by a sassy bastardization of the Graeae, transformed from one of the more
fascinating branches of the Greek pantheon into a repugnant comedy act that plays like a cheap ripper of the Night Bus from the third Harry Potter
movie. To the picture’s credit, early on there’s a fairly disturbing child murder; to its
detriment, that’s pretty much the only thing here that has anything like an edge. The
perfunctory bitch antagonist (Leven Rambin) becomes pliant and meek for no
discernible reason, and a battleship full of Confederate zombies is absolutely
squandered. Dialogue is juvenile and mostly functions as a bridge from one nonsense event to
the next, and while the young actors do their best to breathe some life into this
thing, it has the reek of desperation and an almost complete confusion
about the reasons behind its own existence. PJ2 is a lot like the third
Narnia movie, or any of the films in that embarrassing Ayn Rand
series–pictures that happen without any real awareness or excitement, fuelled
by a small cabal of perhaps-fanaticals/perhaps-opportunists identifying some
phantom demographic eager to throw money at anything with a brand, however
niche. Maybe they’re right. I hope they aren’t.
