Gods of Egypt

Let's give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy's car in a dumb movie from the '70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It's also straddled by a divine she-warrior who sends it crashing through a dead desert city in pursuit of a surfer-boy thief (Brenton Thwaites) and a giant blond god (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, embiggened by CGI.) It's dumb as hell, but at least it's an impassioned, sumptuous dumbness. The best moments play like the creators, in their cracked way, fully believe all this is awesome and can't wait to make you gape at it.

This is Clash of the Titans-style adventure hokum, spiced with the pantheon of Ra and the director's bold interest in cleavage. As they strive to reclaim Egypt from the evil of Set (Gerard Butler), Coster-Waldau's Horus and Thwaites' Bek road-trip through a universe as deep-dish geeky as the Asgard of that first Thor movie. We meet Ra himself, played by Geoffrey Rush for some reason, piloting a skiff far above the flat disc of earth with the sun towed behind him, and we plunge into the maw of the billion-toothed space-worm that picks its once-a-night fight with him. We get some elaborate pyramid-raiding, with too-busy death traps that suggest the filmmakers haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark but have played Lego Indiana Jones. The fighting, while never distinguished, is almost always legible to the eye; perhaps the workaday plot and inane battles are the cost of all that sustained, playful splendor.