Chris Columbus, Sucking the Life Out of Beloved Children's Literature Since 2001
by Jesse Hassenger
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Directed by Chris Columbus
Somehow, on the journey from scrappy eighties comedies (like Gremlins, which he wrote, or Adventures in Babysitting, which he directed) to resource-heavy adaptations like Harry Potter, Rent, and now Percy Jackson, Chris Columbus has become a worse director for wear. Not having read the Percy Jackson book series, I can't say whether he treats the film with the same leaden book-on-tape reverence that slowed down those first two Potter pictures, but regardless, that experience hasn't honed his aptitude for shaping big-budget spectacle. His camera swoops around the world of Olympic gods and goddesses without much sense, searching for the secret dolly shot that will turn the film into an epic.
Maybe this is just how a Columbus movie looks without even a promising starting place; if the Jackson books aren't Potter knockoffs on the page, the screenplay by Craig Titley makes the resemblance unavoidable. Stop me if you've read this one seven times, and also seen it in six movies: Percy (Logan Lerman) is a seemingly normal kid with a crummy home life, until he's whisked away to a magical training ground for magical kids, where he meets one sidekick of each gender and embarks upon a death-defying search for a magical object.
The kids' magic comes courtesy of their demigod status, not wizarding—Percy is the son of Poseidon and he seeks the stolen lightning bolt of Zeus—but those differences are largely cosmetic. The Lightning Thief pays delicate yet vaguely insulting lip-service to the non-fantasy world; Percy realizes that his perceived dyslexia and ADHD are actually symptoms of his super-powered specialness. He also realizes, unlike Harry Potter, that he doesn't so much have to practice his magical powers to get good at them; he just has to start brandishing a sword around, and he's ready for his hero's journey.
That journey doesn't require much preparation because it turns out to be a rush-job. Some of the creature designs are fun, as are a few modern spins on mythology: the Lotus Eaters inspire a clever Vegas-set sequence where our heroes, like so many gamblers before them, lose track of time in a windowless casino (though it's puzzling that lifelong students of mythology as history would somehow fail to recognize the significance of a casino named after the Lotus, or any number of other obvious dangers). But the film rarely sustains any of its good ideas, and script uses such endless exposition that if something isn't explicitly spelled out by dialogue, it becomes hazy: when Percy's mother (Catherine Keener, far from Where the Wild Things Are) disappears from the movie, it takes another ten or twenty minutes to clarify that Percy thinks she's dead.
It could be, too, that Lerman is a particularly blank and Disney-pretty actor, but given Columbus's trademark broad touch with child actors (last seen goading poor Rupert Grint to mug through Chamber of Secrets) and the dialogue that sound like an eight-year-old's imitation of wisecracks ("the health department needs to give this place an F" and "it's like high school without the musical," among others; they're scarcely less of a non-sequitur in context), it's difficult to tell. Just to be safe: Sony, please don't make him Spider-Man. Just to be safer: authors, please don't sell your movie rights to Columbus.
Opens February 12
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