Monday, March 28, 2016

Gods of Egypt - Oy


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Well there is bad / awful and bad / good.  Gods of Egypt is bad / fabulous!
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So much, so very much that makes no sense.  I mean Jupiter Ascending was like Jane Austin compared to this.
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Let me list the ways I love this.
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Lizard women riding giant lizards.
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They chased our hero God Horus and his man-twink Bek through a garden castle of his father's that has turned to this in less than a year.
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Horus and Bek
Now, you might wonder what is with the angle here.  Well in Gods of Egypt the "Gods" are somewhere between 2 feet and twice as tall as humans.  The difference being how well the shot worked.  This is a semi-traditional buddy comedy / action movie except the buddies are a God and a Man (technically - although he looks about 16).  Which leans the odd homoerotic joke a little creepy.
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But I get ahead of myself. 
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Gods of Egypt tries to play it semi-straight until Horus, with one eye, goes up to see Grand-dad Ra.
Ra.
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Geoffrey Rush, as Ra who lives on a space barge and daily fights the Chaos Worm of Evil.  Really.
It seems that Geoffrey Rush, playing to a paycheck, decided to say screw it, and went for laughs.  The movie is hard to take seriously as Geoffrey Rush asks "Why did you bring the mortal?" in the same way a hostess at a dinner party might say, "I think you have dog-shit on your shoe."
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Then there is Gerald Butler.  Who normally plays the good beefy guy, but now plays the bad beefy guy.  He seemed to go to the Boris Badanov school of evil where the more evil you are the more you overact.
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Ut oh, he's mad at her....
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Then there was the embarrassment of the God of Knowledge, Thoth.  Even the name they made lispy.  One of the few Gods of color, Thoth (Chadwick Boseman - slumming after playing Jackie Robinson in 42) is the gayest of the Gods.  I don't know why, but it was a particularly odd choice that the only speaking actor of color was gay gay gay.
Thoth - Chadwick Boseman in a dress of green leather and sequins.  And that wasn't the gayest thing about him.
The good news that Chadwick didn't play it too camp, but just enough to make us all in the joke.  I loved him.
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Finally I have to give GIANT props to Rufus Sewell.  No, he wasn't good.  He was the picture of embarrassed acting as the master builder for Set (Gerard).  But, you cannot find a picture of him on the web as the builder.  None.  Not on imbd.  Not on his website. Not on wikipedia.
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The only one I could find was this - and you can't see his face.  I think he was the smartest of the group.
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On the other hand, Elodie Yung, with a big part, found this wasn't her break out role.  She was stuck wearing this outfit over and over, through the swamps and everything.
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This is, I found, a show where the trailer IS representative of the movie.
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