Friday, November 11, 2011
Film Now playing: Immortals
Posted By J.R. Jones on 11.11.11 at 01:30 PM
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Indian director Tarsem Singh found an ideal format for his surreal imagery with The Fall (2006), which was framed by the sweet story of a little girl being told a fantastic tale by an injured movie stuntman as they recuperate in a Los Angeles hospital. There’s nothing sweet about Singh's follow-up feature, a grisly 300 knockoff starring Henry Cavill as the Greek warrior Theseus and Mickey Rourke as the wicked King Hyperion. The movie is studded with memorable tableaux—a cubelike prison with miserable slaves held in check by horizontal rods, a giant head wrapped in white bandages and lit from within by candles, the minotaur as a human badass wearing a bull-shaped mask of nails—but this never rises above the level of a plodding sword-and-sandal adventure, peopled with chiseled young beauties (Freida Pinto, Luke Evans, Joseph Morgan) and old pros phoning it in (Rourke, Stephen Dorff, John Hurt). Singh is a talented and eccentric visual artist with no creative future in the movie business. Immortals opens today; click here for showtimes.
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