[Review] Gods of Egypt

If you've glimpsed at any of the recent box office headlines, you know that Gods of Egypt plunged into theaters like a wretched deuce during this past #OscarsSoWhite weekend. To be fair, this film appeared to be a steamy stinker from the very beginning, and it's almost lucky that not a lot people paid attention to its messy, sloppy, and un-wipeable release.

The film's intro sequence scans the Egyptian land, and the visuals look worse than most video games that were made over a decade ago. And evidently, the Earth is indeed flat during this time period (paging B.o.B). The opening scenes between the youthful Bek (Brenton Thwaites) and Zaya (Courtney Eaton) make it known that director Alex Proyas apparently didn't care about the acting in this movie being corny and terrible. Then we meet King Horus (or Jamie Lannister) in a scene that has a Game of Thrones porn parody vibe to it. At this point, I'm just hoping that Gods of Egypt can at least function like an unintentionally funny clunker, but it doesn't even succeed in that way.

Eventually, Gerard Butler shows up, adding to his wildly impressive streak of being in awful movies (that aren't animated). Chadwick Boseman (42, Get on Up) is basically the only African American actor in the main cast, and it's practically the cinematic equivalent of "I have a black friend." But the biggest crime of all might be that the filmmakers didn't just embrace the ridiculousness and bring in Nicolas Cage for the leading role. If that had been the case, this would be a cult classic. The tone is perfectly ripe for some Nic Cage greatness, so this is a major missed opportunity. I mean, the guy literally has his own pyramid tomb waiting for him after he dies. How could they NOT cast him in this?

The constantly loud and intrusive music attempts to compensate for the poor excuse for spectacle that is taking place on the screen. It's never quite clear what the hell is going on in this movie. Every character in the script is crudely under-established, and next thing you know, they're warping into winged creatures that you might recognize best from The History Channel's "Ancient Aliens". And I'm not making this up, but there is an actual sequence where Jamie Lannister's beast incarnation gloriously flies through a large rippled circle that seems to symbolize an anus.

There also is a scene in here that involves a herd of elephants hauling dumpster-like containers of gold. For a moment, I thought the filmmakers might have been self-aware about this thing being a heap of crap, but ultimately there isn't anything gold about Gods of Egypt, so it doesn't even get points for that. This very well may go down as one of the worst films of the past few years, and it'll be in many "How did this get made?" discussions, that is--if enough people even bother to see it. (Seriously, who okay'd this?) But instead of being praised for being so-bad-it's-good, it's going to be lambasted and blasphemed on all parts, like the massive pile of ungodly trash that it is.

2/10