Entertainment

‘Immortal’ Greek god of gore

“Release The Kra – – ” . . . Sorry, wrong movie. In “Immortals,” it’s “Release the gold lamé!” Also, “Unsheathe the abs!” “Ventilate the carotids!” “Let fly the magic neon arrows!” If someone had produced a Holy Hand Grenade, I wouldn’t have blinked. If it’s violence ye seek, and violently confused storytelling, look ye no further.

A buffet for the retinas and a fast for the mind, this gods-and-heroes tale opens with a notation that it’s 1228 BC and a quotation on immortal souls from Socrates (who came along so many years after 1228 BC that the time gap is equivalent to the one between Kublai Khan and Chaka Khan, but whatever).

In a previous war, the gods defeated the Titans, who have since been imprisoned in a giant box where they are arranged in rows and joined at the mouth by rods: hell’s foosball team. A hater of supreme beings, the barbarian ruler Hyperion, comes growling along vowing to free the Titans, make war on the gods and recover the Bow of Epirus that means supreme power. Hyperion often wears horror headgear such as a pair of bronze bunny ears and a rhinestone-covered hockey mask, though when he shows his face he becomes truly scary: Underneath he’s Mickey Rourke. Courtesy of this mad king, one guy gets both sides of his face raked and receives a giant mallet blow to his crotch — and he’s an ally.

Over on the Greek side, the peasant Theseus (Henry Cavill) is proving to be a ready warrior (he hasn’t figured out his kindly old dad, played by John Hurt, is really Zeus), who gets miffed when Hyperion slashes his mom’s throat. Theseus goes into slavery like Ben-Hur, but we never appreciate his struggle. Every 15 minutes or so he runs his sword through a few gross of embarrassingly killable enemy soldiers. If he really gets in trouble, he gets rescued, either by a virgin oracle (Freida Pinto) with a habit of seeing hazy visions of the future or by the gods, who keep zooming down from heaven in their shiny golden cabana-wear to murder the Greeks’ enemies. Incidentally, this movie breaks with the Laurence Olivier/Liam Neeson school of casting immortals. When not in disguise, Zeus and his fellow deities look like they just graduated high school and lounge around sensuously half-naked. Maybe they live on Mt. Abercrombie. Think of “Immortals” as the “Twilight” of the gods.

Director Tarsem Singh, whose only previous major film was the 2000 Jennifer Lopez fantasy “The Cell,” does not have a brilliant script to work with (the would-be cynical wisecracks of the would-be Han Solo figure, played by Stephen Dorff, fail to jolly up the bits between the bloodbaths). And what Singh has got, he garbles. Somewhere in the confusion the magic bow switches owners (twice), but you barely notice even though it’s supposed to be the most important object in the world. The climax can best be described as a giant meaningless whoosh. When Theseus gives his troops a forgettable motivational speech, the moment is supposed to be all “Henry V,” but, as the men start banging rhythmically on their shields, it’s more like “Stomp.”

It’s impossible to tell whether Cavill will make a good Superman (his next big role) because Singh cares so little about people. His idea of the way to handle stilted dialogue is to break it up with long, awkward pauses. Everything is as stiff as a Charlton Heston movie, minus the cornball appeal.

Where Singh excels is in those spooky, gorgeous visuals. You can see the influence of modernists like De Chirico. As in “The Cell,” he provides heaps of freaky costumes, geometric forms and stark central images framed by nothingness. Young Theseus, it turns out, trained as a swordsman by, um, beating up a tree. How is a fixed object to provide lessons in fluid combat? Forget it, Singh just likes the look of the lone, crooked growth against an infinity of nothingness. At the end, his camera looks up the crotches of flying warriors hurling themselves across the firmament as if in perpetual sky battle. Spectacularly silly? Yes, but at least it’s spectacular.