North African Pantheon

Poor Geoffrey Rush. Poor, poor, poor Geoffrey Rush. Even an accomplished, Academy Award-winning thespian of his caliber (who somehow made a role in the absurd Pirates of the Caribbean seem excellent) could not save the abysmal Gods of Egypt. We journey back to time immemorial, before recorded history, when the gods lived amongst the humans, even if they were 11 feet tall and all looked like fucking supermodels. Osiris, ruler of the lush Nile-adjacent capital, is to step down from the throne and his son Horus (Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is supposed to take his place. But nope—Set, god of the barren desert wastes (Gerard Butler, who will apparently be in any ridiculously CGI'd action movie based in ancient history/mythology), ain't havin' it. He shows up to ruin everyone's lives and sets into motion a pain-ridden fascist regime marked only by death, ostentatious monuments and a logistics change in the underworld. A young thief named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) gets fed up with the bullshit, though, and along with his girlfriend, he sets out to change things up and restore Horus to power.

And oh, how they journey and fight. There is no obstacle too powerful to overcome them, be it windswept deserts, humongous fire-breathing snakes, the murderous Set or Chadwick Boseman's (42) criminally awful British accent as Thoth. The baffling nature of all movies assigning British accents to any/all non-Americans aside, the above points come together to become a film not only bad by this specific sub-genre's already low standards, but compared to pretty much anything you can think up. The gods all transform into robotically exaggerated versions of themselves, for some reason; the main guy's wisecracks fall far short of humor again and again, until you just kind of wish he'd die; the journey to the ultimate showdown is ludicrous (and in some cases straight-up lifted from the video game series God of War); and perhaps most painful of all, Rush's phoned-in performance as sun god Ra is so inconsequential that even a laser-spear battle with a cosmic Sarlacc wouldn't be enough of a reason to see this hot garbage. Why have you forsaken us, Gods of Egypt? And why do people keep allowing movies like this to happen?

Gods of Egypt
Violet Crown, Regal,
PG-13,
127 min.

Santa Fe Reporter