Movie review: Immortals

If you’re looking for a movie this weekend to watch without engaging your brain, letting the brawn and physicality of what’s up on screen just wash over you, then Immortals offers 110 minutes of mythical, mindless entertainment.

Directed by Tarsem Singh and from the same production team that brought us 300 this is again a dark, violent, brooding tale of men with muscles trying to repel a bloody invader. Here our hero is the new Superman himself, Henry Cavill, starring as Theseus, a favourite of the ancient Greek gods who is called upon to protect the Vestal Virgin (Freida Pinto) from the power-mad, marauding King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke yet again in full-on comic baddie mode).

Hyperion aims to release the fabled Titans from their bonds and unleash hell on earth and it seems only Theseus, with the help of an opportunistic theif played by Stephen Dorff, can stop him.

Singh certainly adds a sprinkle of mystical Eastern darkness to proceedings (in fact, at times the film looks like it has been shot through the Stygian gloom) with buckets of blood, decapitations, ritualistic scarring and castrations (at which point a collective groan escapes from male members of the audience) and people being roasted alive, meanwhile the shiny gods atop Mount Olympus, led by Luke Evans as Zeus, deliberate over whether they should intervene in the matters of mere mortals.

The look of the film (the bits you can actually see) is reminiscent of 300 and Cavill and Dorff add the stud factor, being stripped to the waist for much of the film in order to show off their rippling muscles. But what 300 had that this lacks is detailed, multi-layered plotting and proper character exposition.

But hey, the final cliffhanger battle is visceral and hard-hitting, it’s a heck of a lot better than Clash of the Titans and if you just want a short period of escapism, then this add a bit of visual candy as you scoff your candyfloss.