Gods of Egypt

Whoa and wow — Gods of Egypt is one bad movie. Actually, it’s about three or four bad movies that are barely strapped together with cinematic mucilage that threatens to droop into a flaccid mess at every turn. It’s the kind of bad movie that ought to be unintentionally amusing. This is, after all, a movie where a promise is dismissed as “not being worth the papyrus is written on.” But, somehow, all its amassed fuss and bother and cleavage and silliness and more cleavage mostly turns out to be tedious. Some have compared it to the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending (2015), but at least that was visually striking and boldly embraced its own insanity. This is mostly an incoherent mess with pretty laughable — and nonstop — CGI that’s about on par with the process work in an early James Bond movie. There’s more.

Where shall we start? There are so many things to choose from, but let’s look at the … interesting casting. Here we have a movie in which the head god in charge, Ra, is played by Australian Geoffrey Rush. Not surprisingly, his son Osiris is also played by an Australian, Bryan Brown. One of his sons — the good one — is Horus, and he’s inexplicably played by the Danish Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The bad son, on the other hand, is named Set and is played by Scottish Gerard Butler. He, in fact, is so Scottish that this god might have been renamed McSet. Perhaps this is why he’s the only one who has been bronzed-up to look more Egyptian, though why he has a very un-Egyptian beard, I don’t know. There’s also Rufus Sewell (English) as an Egyptian architect. And a love-struck character named Bek — played by Australian Brenton Thwaites, naturally. That’s the overall tone.

The only reasonable casting is pretty much limited to Chadwick Boseman, who plays a campy Thoth, accompanied by a chorus line of clones that makes him somewhat resemble the multiple Kylie Minogue absinthe fairies in Moulin Rouge! (2001). Boseman steals what there is to steal of the movie — which, in this case, amounts to petit larceny. He does get extra points, though, for ending an argument by saying, “Yes, well …” and earned the film a full star of its rating. (You take your pleasures where you find them.) I suppose I should find this mostly lily-white (with bronzing makeup) casting offensive, but it’s hard to take Gods of Egypt seriously enough to be offended by it. It has nothing to do with Egypt, really. And the gods are like something out of a Marvel comic, except that they’re about 3 to 5 feet taller than the mortals, making them resemble those artificially enlarged natives in the 1935 serial The Lost City. Plus, the whole thing feels like one of those badly dubbed “Sons of Hercules” movies that used to proliferate on Saturday afternoon TV in the 1960s.

The story is actually more like the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad than anything else. Just consider Brendon Thwaite as Sabu, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as John Justin (though that eye patch business makes him look like Kirk Douglas in 1958’s The Vikings) and Gerard Butler as Conrad Veidt. Basically, it’s an ancient world salad (which is probably reasonable in a movie where Thoth argues with himself over what to call lettuce).

Little of it makes sense, though lots of it is pretty bizarre — like Ra doing battle nightly with some toothy worm thing in order that the sun may rise again over the apparently flat earth. OK. Then there’s Set tooling around in what appears to be a giant June-bug-powered airship. (I guess they’re supposed to be giant scarabs, but they’re awfully reminiscent of tying a June bug to a thread like we used to do as kids.) We also get giant fire-breathing cobras and a shape-shifting pyramid complete with CGI Sphinx and his riddle, as well as a trip to the underworld that makes a complete hash of the Book of the Dead. (Yeah, like that matters here.) Finally, we get giant robotic gods in a comic-book-movie smackdown. In the words of Thoth, “Yes, well … .” Rated PG-13 for fantasy violence and action, and some sexuality.