Chris Columbus must feel like he’s stepped back in time. Directing the first film of a series of novels, telling the story of a boy with special powers and his two friends who step in to help him out, must feel like extreme deja-vous.
Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is a teenager who believes he is different but does not know why yet. When he is accused of stealing Zeus’s lightning bolt, he and his friend Grover (Brandon T.Jackson) flee to a special camp for demi-gods. Their choice is to either retrieve the lightning bolt and return it, or prepare for all out war…
Percy Jackson has Harry Potter coming out of its ears, an obvious ploy by Fox to try and assure longevity and a franchise for the popular teen books by Rick Riordan. The Greek mythology of the film kept me interested even if it was playing out a little like “Guess the God”. The script felt lazy – characters stating obvious facts that the visuals had already shown but that will hardly deter the intended audience of 13 year olds who already think they’re gods.
Logan Lerman excels in the lead role as a likeable and, for the most part, believable hero. Sean Bean, Uma Thurman and Steve Coogan also have fun with roles that are little more than cameos, while Pierce Brosnan bellows his way through his role as a guiding centaur – or as he states in the film, a ‘horse’s arse’. He said it, not us.
In the end, the film plays out like a cross between Harry Potter and Stormbreaker, the lone Alex Ryder film outing from author Anthony Horowitz – a film that tries to live up to the hype of the former but will ultimately end up as the latter, enjoyable at the time but not enough to make it memorable.
Words: Anna Hayes
