Review of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) by Mitchell B — 04 Aug 2013

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is mediocre at best as both a film in general and also a fantasy film. I have seen many fantasy movies at this point like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Narnia films, the Harry Potter films, etc. Compared to all of those films this does not stack up well. It is definitely not the worst fantasy movie out there. It is not as bad as the Twilight Saga or the Golden Compass, but it is not anything special either.

First of all I did not find the characters interesting at all. They are the stereotypical characters that you tend to find in a story like this. Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) himself is the typical hero and fish-out-of-water characters. There is nothing to his character that I have not seen before and done better. Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) is the typical black comic relief who I did not think was that funny. The best character in the movie is definitely Annabeth (Alexandra Deddario). She is the love interest I guess, but she is tough and can take care of herself. She is the best of the main cast, but even her I did not find all that interesting either. There are other decent character like Zeus (Sean Bean) Mr. Brunner (Pierce Brosnan), but they are not in the film that much.

The story is very simple and not interesting. Someone stole Zeus's lightning bolt and they half to go find it. Sometimes simple stories can work if the movie is entertaining, but in this case it wasn't.

Another thing that did not work for me was that they take a lot of Greek Mythology and modernize it for comedy which does not work at all, at least for me. The comedy is not funny at all either. There were a couple scenes that got a laugh but mostly the humor was dry. The effects were not that good either. They were not bad but compared to Harry Potter or Narnia, the effects are lackluster.

Overall, I would skip this one. I heard the books are fairly good. I f you are interested in this then read the books. The new movie is coming out and it does not look any better looking at the trailer.