Gods of Egypt

Actors: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Brenton Thwaites, Chadwick Boseman, Élodie Yung, Courtney Eaton, Rufus Sewell, Gerard Butler, Geoffrey Rush.

Rating: 7 out of 10, A glorious mess of a movie. It purports to show ancient Egypt at a time when the actual Gods lived amongst the people; granted they were all ten feet tall, bled gold, and spoke with a variety of European accents. I say a mess because this movie is totally incomprehensible at times with a leaden plot and wooden actors. Some films (Sin City and 300 to name a couple) embrace total immersion in CGI and make it work. Whoever made this did not. By trying to do too much they ended up not doing enough, if that even begins to make sense. With an all-CGI movie you have to care about the characters and outside of the sprightly human duo, all the “gods” were just kind of there. Gerard Butler as the bad god chewed up his usual amount of scenery but his Scottish brogue was so thick at times as to be unintelligible. Coster-Waldau as the hero doesn’t connect with his plucky human sidekick or the audience. I think this was supposed to be his big “coming out” film but he fails at almost every turn. So a disaster of a movie but visually stunning, at least we see who’d win a fight between Jaime Lannister and King Leonidas

MVP: Thwaites as the plucky Bek, more luck than ability