This is an interesting film to review because of how bad it is. If I am to evaluate the film purely on its content, then I would give Gods of Egypt a big fat 0. However, this film is so bad that I found much of it quite funny so at the very least it had me entertained.
I Don’t Want To Die, I Want To Live!
In case you are unfamiliar with the plot, here is a quick rundown: A god is going to be crowned king, but then another god who looks a lot like Leonidas takes the crown for himself and rules over the rest of the gods and humans with an iron first, which triggers a human and a god to team up in order to take him down. This is essentially what the plot boils down to, and in reality the plot becomes even less interesting than what is written on paper. However, I do want to start this review off properly, so I will examine the few aspects the film gets right. First of all, and most importantly, it thoroughly entertained me. I went into Gods of Egypt fully expecting a terrible film, so it was fun to see how bad the acting and writing got as the film progressed. Let this be a warning to you all, if you go into this film expecting it to be bad, you will leave it having fun like I did. However, if you anticipate a well crafted film, then you are in for a rude awakening. Another slight positive to the film is Gerard Butler. The rest of the actors did their jobs, but they took the material far too seriously. It is very clear that Mr. Butler saw the film for what it was and played his role accordingly. Finally, the world that the film creates is actually fairly interesting. The sad fact of the matter is the cast and crew had no idea what to do with this world, so the end product is a jumbled mess that has no clear sense of what kind of film it wants to be.
Only A Madman Would Try Such A Thing
By far the weakest aspect of this film is the writing. The dialogue is laughably bad, but what really surprised me is how the film progresses its plot. For example: there is a part in the film where a character is clearly killed off and it was a major turning point. Then one of the characters basically says “Oh he’s not dead, yet. We need to stop the bad guy before a certain time, and he will be okay”. So the writers had no idea how to add tension and urgency to the film so they added in this stupid little wrinkle to the plot. Believe me, when I saw and heard that on screen I laughed out loud. It just seemed like the writers did not care about what they were writing because everything in the film is lazily put together and without much logic. To their credit, they tinkered around with a very interesting concept. I need to get into some spoilers to get across my thoughts, but I seriously doubt these spoilers will matter much to you at all. Early on in the film the main human character’s girlfriend gets killed which was kind of unexpected. He tried to save her for most of the film, but in the end he gets killed as well. At this point I thought that the film was going to have them both dead, but together in the underworld which would be an unexpected but welcome little twist into the film. However, in the end both of them get saved by one of the gods and they live happily ever after. The writers are already helming such a poor film, they might as well make it interesting. But no, they decided to go with the cliché ending that undermines the rest of the film. On top of the poor writing you really have misguided direction, confused acting, a running time that overstays its welcome, and some horrendous visual effects. Some of the visual effects were quite good, but more often than not they were bad.
Closing Remarks
All in all, I would not advise you to spend your money for this film. Sure, I spent my money, but that is mainly so I could tell you guys to save yours. It is fairly entertaining with a good “hammy” performance by Gerard Butler, but the ends do not justify the means. Gods of Egypt shows exactly what is wrong with Hollywood (I did not even mention the “White washing”) and hopefully Hollywood will stop producing films of such low quality.