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One of the great pleasures of our boring childhood was curling up behind a shelf with a tattered copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology while our cousins ran around screaming in the yard. We preferred reading about the shenanigans of the gods and heroes of ancient Greece to playing patintero with children (Never liked children, especially when we were a child). No game of habulan-statue was half as exciting as Zeus sneaking around seducing human women while wearing disguises (a swan, a golden shower, etc) to throw off his suspicious wife Hera. The gods were immature, fallible and petty, they behaved arbitrarily and did not provide good examples for the mortals. The humans were better off without them. And the gods had favorites like Hercules, Jason and Theseus.

Tarsem Singh’s movie The Immortals is “loosely based” on the story of Theseus, and by “loosely” they mean they kept the names. The resulting plot is weird, but nowhere near as weird as the myth which involves bestiality (the queen who fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur), human sacrifice (seven young men and seven young women had to be offered to the Minotaur every year), breach of promise (Theseus promised to marry the woman who told him how to escape the labyrinth, then ditched her on an island) and incestuous obsession (Theseus’s wife Phaedra tried to seduce his son by a previous relationship, then accused him of rape). Any illusions about the movie’s fidelity to the source is dashed immediately: in the first scene the Sibylline oracle is spelled “Sybelline”.

The Immortals is produced by the team that gave us 300 and directed by the guy who did The Cell. This could only mean one thing: Naked men in slow motion!

Henry Cavill as Theseus.

We were not disappointed. The beautiful Henry Cavill, soon to don the tights and cape of Superman, is the peasant Theseus who must protect the virgin oracle Phaedra (Frieda Pinto) and prevent her from revealing the whereabouts of the Epirus Bow to the sadistic king Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) who plans to use it to free the Titans from a giant metal cage inside a mountain and wage war against Zeus (Luke Evans) and the gods so he can achieve world domination.

In case we forget that they possess well-developed abs, the gods wear armor with abs. Theseus’s armor comes with an intestine pattern.

This being a Tarsem Singh movie, everything is color-coded for easy reference. The architecture is gray minimalist-modernist-ish, the humans are tan and grimy, the gods are golden with dramatic headdresses, and the titans are simian and covered in layers of gray dust. We know Theseus is heroic because his abs have abs and his jaws could cut glass. We know the oracle is gifted because when she washes her face her eyeliner and eyeshadow stay on. We know Hyperion is nasty because he looks like Mickey Rourke and he neuters his followers with a sledgehammer. (Actually Mickey with a scarred face enclosed in a headdress that looks like a Venus flytrap ate him is less scary than Mickey carrying a chihuahua in real life.)

Luke Evans will play Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit. He’s openly gay so you won’t be crying on TV interviews.

We know Zeus is the king of the gods because when you see him you say “Ohmyged.” Zeus is played by Luke Evans, who looks like a taller, more muscular Dominic Cooper—guapo, medyo banlag, already typecast as a god (Apollo in Clash of the Titans). He is so obviously a deity he must walk the earth disguised as John Hurt. And we know that Kellan Lutz and company are gods because they are shiny and perfect and they live in a Vogue fashion spread.

The humans are kind of stupid because they insist on building their cities on the edges of very tall cliffs. Zeus forbids his brother and children from interfering in mortal affairs, even if he himself had a hand in training Theseus. When the gods come down to earth they swish their capes fabulously while blood gushes in slow-motion from their foes’ bisected torsos.

There are only 5 or 6 gods in Olympus; the others must’ve watched Clash of the Titans and refused to have anything more to do with movies. Stephen Dorff turns up as a thief who helps Theseus, reminding us how much we liked him in Blade.

Reason to skip The Immortals: It’s stupid. Reasons to watch The Immortals: pretty, pretty actors and evil Mickey Rourke. We had fun. Recommended for those who found 300 too butch.