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 In cinemas now [M]
Director: Chris Columbus
Runtime: 119 mins.
I’m just going to say right now that I’m a sucker for a well-structured movie – the kind you read about in Screen Writing 101 textbooks, with a hero on a clearly delineated quest, and a series of obstacles and complications so neat you can plot them on a graph. It’s formulaic, sure, but when it’s done right, it makes for a fun and compelling experience. For my money, Percy Jackson, a skilfully-made and satisfying adventure story, is just such a movie. Director Chris Columbus can probably take a lot of the credit – a veteran of the Harry Potter franchise, he can probably do this kind of thing in his sleep these days – but a strong script and a talented cast make the whole thing an irresistible guilty pleasure.
Percy Jackson is based on the premise that the gods and monsters from ancient Greek myths still exist in the modern world – many of them, conveniently enough, residing in the continental USA. Percy himself (Logan Lerman) is a high school student with a strange affinity for ancient Greek and a stranger habit of sitting at the bottom of swimming pools. The reason for this quickly becomes clear when he learns that his absentee father is actually Poseidon, the god of the sea, and that he is therefore half god himself. From here, it doesn’t take long for the plot to kick in – Percy discovers that he is suspected of stealing a lightning bolt from Zeus, and has two weeks to prove his innocence and recover the bolt in order to prevent an all-out war between the gods and save his mother (Catherine Keener), who was kidnapped in the midst of all this. Before you can say First Act Turning Point, he and two sidekicks, a wisecracking satyr (Brandon T. Jackson) and a blue-eyed warrior princess (Alexandra Daddario) are on a road trip to adventure.
I’m not saying that Percy Jackson is high art or anything – it’s a goofy, good-natured kids film, but it does the job very well, moving from set-piece to set-piece at an even clip as it cheekily recontextualises various familiar Greek myths. The guest cast is also excellent – Uma Thurman plays Medusa like a throwback to Kill Bill, Steve Coogan’s Hades is plagued with inadequacies, while Rosario Dawson’s Persephone is a minx straight out of Real Housewives Of New Jersey. If you’re in the mood for a cinematic guilty pleasure, you could do a whole lot worse.
****
ALASDAIR DUNCAN
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