Percy Jackson and the Don’t Go See This Movie
On the elementary school playground of young adult fiction, I’d much rather be picked to be on Percy Jackson’s team than Harry Potter’s. Potter is a spoiled kid with an ego the size of a half-giant, while Percy seems like a pretty decent kid. Similarly, I’d rather read any of the Percy Jackson books. When it comes to movies, however . . .
Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters is, sadly, pretty terrible. I remember watching the first one and being unimpressed, but this one was flat out bad. It was Little Ninjas bad. The acting, the dialogue, the script . . . pretty much everything skewed so far away from the quality of the book that it would have been better if it had starred Will Smith or Brad Pitt. A large part of this movie’s problem resulted in them trying to follow the first movie, which cut and combined characters and scenes that were pretty critical for further story down the road. The rest of this movie’s problem comes with how shitty everything about it is.
The second part of the Percy Jackson stories covers Percy and company heading to the Bermuda Triangle to recover the Golden Fleece, so that they can use it’s magical healing powers to fix the tree outside of Camp Half-Blood. The tree was formerly a girl named Thalia who was transformed after she died by her father Zeus so that Camp Half-Blood would be protected from monsters. Percy is actually not the one given this quest – instead it’s given to the daughter of Ares, Clarisse. In the books, Clarisse is a pretty terrible person, exhibiting real cruelty and the type of abuse often passed by kids from broken homes. She’s a good lesson in the cyclical nature of violence and anger. In the film she kind of teases Percy and gives mixed signals about being a love interest, as does Percy’s friend Annabeth, who is new to this film. Well, I guess that makes sense, since in the first movie Clarisse and Annabeth were combined into the same character. This is only one of the problems the previous movie shoved onto this one.
So, Percy Jackson heads down to Florida with his two friends Stereotyped Black Guy and Arm Candy, as well as his newfound half-brother Tyson. In the novels, Tyson is an ugly cyclops that Percy thought was a homeless kid, so he took him in and gave him a place to stay. In the movie, Tyson is Encino Man.
No one wheezes the juice anymore.
The film also uses several different obvious techniques to avoid the CQ required to produce his single eye – from sunglasses to magic mist. Basically we get a teenager dressing and looking like a young popstar who is supposed to be outcast because of his looks and behavior. Out of a lot of bad actors, the kid playing Tyson really took the cake.
Some shit happens that loosely resembles the book, and at the end, the heroes recover the Golden Fleece and use it on the tree. To their surprise, the magic of the Fleece works too well and ends up reviving Thalia, the girl that was originally turned into the tree. This sets up the big story for the rest of the series, where it becomes less obvious that Percy Jackson is the demi-god that a big prophecy spoke of, and of emotional tugs based around the Luke/Annabeth/Thalia trio. The movie ends on a cliffhanger, which is a little annoying, considering that this movie was bad enough that there is no way they are getting another sequel.
The most disappointing part of the film is in how many great actors played small parts in this piece of garbage. Stanley Tucci, Yvette Nicole Brown, Anthony Stuart Head, Robert Knepper, Ron Perlman . . . even Nathon Fillion showed up and dropped an obligatory Firefly joke. There are few things I dislike more than seeing great actors give the best performance they can when hampered by scripts like this. One of the things I dislike more is watching the shitty actors in the same movie.
