Maybe the advent of the 3-D era can help restore the scare factor.įor Percy, whose bedraggled earthly mother, Sally (Catherine Keener), is kidnapped and imprisoned in Hades, much of the journey is a cross-country treasure hunt to retrieve the blue pearls that will enable him and his fellow travelers to exit hell safely after they liberate her. Such creatures are so prolific nowadays that even this movie’s hounds of hell elicit a ho-hum response. The movie’s generic CGI monsters represent no technological advance. At the very least the movie serves as a crisply outlined tutorial on Greek mythology.įor all the earth shaking that goes on, “Percy Jackson” is agreeably tame and unthreatening. Wrongly suspected by Zeus (Sean Bean) of stealing the lightning bolt required to wield absolute power, Percy embarks on a quest to retrieve it and clear his name in time to forestall a world-destroying war among the gods. The story is a race against time in which Percy, a dyslexic high school student (in the book he is only 12), discovers that he is the son of Poseidon. Although the standard allegorical bases for mythical-quest movies are dutifully covered, the obvious similarity of “Percy Jackson” to the Harry Potter movies inevitably makes it feel somewhat secondhand. The movie, in which virginal teenagers do battle with fire-belching monsters, belongs to the same family-friendly genre as the “National Treasure” films. Almost all the conversation among the adolescents comes across as flat and mechanical, no matter how many “cools” are inserted. Craig Titley’s screenplay doesn’t try to reconcile cleaned-up contemporary teenage argot with the deities’ verbal grandiosity the gods’ pomposity, though relatively restrained, still has an oratorical ring. But he clomps across it with a fairly heavy tread. The film’s man-horse hybrid is one of its most amusing creations.Ĭhris Columbus, the man in charge of this unwieldy fusion, directed the first two Harry Potter movies, and so he knows the territory. Brunner (Pierce Brosnan), is also a centaur. It is at camp that the movie’s young hero, Percy Jackson (the blandly appealing Logan Lerman), discovers that his high school classics teacher, Mr. For those who have forgotten, demigods are the children of gods and goddesses who procreated with humans. I should add that although there is no singing and dancing in “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” the friendly scuffles at Camp Half-Blood, the lush, lakeside training ground for adolescent demigods, are staged like production numbers in a juvenile swords-and-sandals pageant. Greek mythology barges into the sanitized ethos of “High School Musical” in the frenziedly busy screen adaptation of Rick Riordan’s popular 2005 novel, “The Lightning Thief.” Because it is the first in the five-book Percy Jackson & the Olympians young-adult series, can a franchise be far behind?
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