Taken on its own merits, the remake of Clash of the Titans is a decent movie. It looks good, the action is pretty good, and then it ends. Damned by feint praise, sure. It’s not a BAD movie and the script is ok without excessive stupidity. It does have some narrative weirdness and our hero’s motives are dubious.

Part of the problem is that it’s trying to adhere to both the original Greek myth and the original movie – and in doing so, they create a very strange story structure that makes Perseus’ motives kind of weird and the story of Andromeda (the girl who must be saved from the kraken) kind of incidental to the plot.

There are also some characters that are underwritten and kind of pointless – if they’d been left out of the movie, it wouldn’t have been harmed in the least. They feel like they should have been more important but maybe their scenes were cut. This is a minor thing – but I picked up on its pointlessness while watching.

But the FX are very good and taken on its own, it’s not a bad movie. Some of the action is overly frantic but I’ve seen much worse (like anything by my hero – Michael Bay).

It’s also kid-friendly – though very grim. There’s at least two discussions of God-on-mortal rape but very little is shown that would be uncomfortable (the God-on-Perseus’-mom scene is more of a trick while God-on-Medusa is only told). At least this is explained and pretty accurate to actual Greek myth (Zeus is kind of a bastard).

Score: 74