Sing to me, O Muse, of the man of twists and turns -- and of how he totally kicks ass.
That, I suppose, would be Homer's prologue to Immortals, Tarsem Singh's remix of Greek myth. Hero Theseus (Henry Cavill) and a comely oracle (Freida Pinto) challenge bloodthirsty tyrant Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) with a magic bow. Also involved are Greek gods and their bestial forebears, the Titans.
Let's not sweat the details: The filmmakers didn't. You could drive a herd of centaurs through the plot holes, and almost the only myth Singh even tries to get right, tellingly, is his depiction of the Sicilian Bull, an ancient torture device.
It's all brought to you by the producers of 300, a comic-book-inspired retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. Immortals dials down 300's homoeroticism and thudding voiceover narration, but retains the fetishized violence, complete with money-shots of spurting blood and entrails.
Singh's visual imagination can be inventive, providing epic scale to the view from Olympus, or the Titans' prison. But the 3-D version yields little more depth than a Greek frieze, barely enhancing Cavil's chiseled torso or Pinto's ass. Which is too bad: I'd almost compare the latter's perfection to Aphrodite's ... except the gods might punish my hubris with some fiendish torment. Like a sequel.
