Gerard Butler stars as a villainous god of darkness.
"Gods, bow before me. Mortals, worship me or die."
Listening to Gerard Butler's villainous god of darkness go super tyrannical, it's apparent that the writers of the $140-million (U.S.) epic Gods of Egypt have either cribbed from professional wrestling scripts or from Kanye West tweets.
Either way, Butler's outrageously ambitious god is nine feet of total jerk, one happy to destroy the world if that's what it takes to own it (Again, the Kanye thing.)
Directed by Australia's Alex Proyas – responsible for The Crow and I, Robot, he isn't known for giggles – this campy 3-D spectacle features a love story among a pair of gleaming-teethed young mortals.
It's set against a family power struggle between gold-bleeding Caucasian deities that really gets going when Butler's sandal-wearing badass steals the eyeballs and takes the throne of his new-king nephew (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, as the lord of the air).
It's all quest, flash and high action after that, but it's hard to take it all nearly as seriously as the actors (including a braided-pony-tailed, top-god-playing Geoffrey Rush in a spaceship!) do.
Brad Wheeler