Immortals: Critic Reviews

Henry Cavill is on the verge of stardom.

Without any narrative heft, these sights don't last in the mind much longer than they linger on screen. And yet they thrill in short-lived bursts that Singh doles out carefully, keeping pace with the audience's appetite.

Sing to me, O Muse, of gods and men, of timeless legends and forgettable retreads. Speak of "Immortals," and answer in all seriousness: did you even read that awful script?

Director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar slathers things with eyecatching visuals - luscious CGI effects, vertiginous camera angles, a treacly amber glow - and keeps every frame watchable, however foolish and stilted the utterances emerging from people's mouths.

For all the digital mastery Immortals boasts, its hokey story leaves the film adrift.

As in his "The Fall," director Tarsem Singh's visual instincts overwhelm his storytelling finesse.

When Hyperion says of one character, "His pain has just begun,'' you know exactly how he feels.

The posters read "From the Producers of 300" and, like Zack Snyder's film, Immortals has little on its mind but conveying the buzz of martial glory.

With "Immortals," Singh finally acknowledges that he's making movies, rather than just beautiful moving pictures.

This monumental tale of warring gods and men is a beautiful, dead thing, bereft of organic or kinetic life.

"The Immortals" is without doubt the best-looking awful movie you will ever see.

Singh is a talented and eccentric visual artist with no creative future in the movie business.

Logic melts away completely and the pic's raison d'etre emerges -- namely, to justify staging a fight scene for the ages.

If it's violence ye seek, and violently confused storytelling, look ye no further.

All too mortal, a film that dies long before its time.

Immortals is aimed squarely at the macho crowd, with the emphasis on heroics and bone-crunching violence in 3-D, with a splash of sexy time to lighten the mood and detract from the flaccid script.

Puffed-up style worthy of trumped-up lore.

If you like blood and guts, with hand-to-hand (or should I say hand-to-spear) combat in video-game-style, you may like this more than I did.

Solid yet hardly sensational, no luxury sedan but a good compact -- fairly efficient in its operation, typically clean in look, and guaranteed to reach its destination with a minimum of fuss.

The same hyperstylized, comic book-come-to-life approach that created an invigorating experience for viewers of 300 elevates Immortals above the level of a Clash of the Titans knock-off.

Visually stunning, but heavy-handed and lacking a single moment that evinces any relish for movie-making.

The pity is that Tarsem's intelligence doesn't connect his cinematic eye to his narrative mind. The director's visual gift is like a brilliant retina, detached.

Where are the gods of Olympus when you need them? I ask on behalf of "Immortals," because mere mortals were apparently not able to create a movie that actually made sense.