Hollywood’s escalating war on originality is far-reaching.  Independent films are finding it more difficult than ever to find distribution, tent-pole summer releases have a set a new precedent for mindless banality and virtually every film ever released will be remade, twice, by the end of next year.  But perhaps the most troubling effect of Hollywood’s favorite sin of commercialism before art is the adverse effect it’s having on film criticism.  Sure, despicable abominations like Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” make great subjects for witty, ranting reviews.  But when any given Hollywood release is virtually indistinguishable from any other, as is generally the case, the criticisms all tend to be the same.

For example: I often find myself writing things like, “The acting was atrocious, the script could have been written by a 3rd grader and the direction was all over the map, but at least the visual effects were spectacular.”  It seems studios are now focusing more heavily than ever on making something look cool to please the fanboys at the utter expense of character and story.  I’d be hard pressed to find a handful of blockbusters in the past five years, with the exception of last year’s “Star Trek,” to which I couldn’t apply that criticism.

And as hard as I try to infuse my criticism with as much creativity as possible, I fully expected my review of Louis Leterrier’s remake of Desmond Davis’ 1981 cult classic, “Clash of the Titans,” to contain a similar phrase.  And indeed, the acting is atrocious and the offensively bad script most probably could have been written by an elementary school student, but unfortunately for us all, this particular iteration of the mindless Hollywood action flick cannot even count an array of impressive visual effects among its redeeming qualities.  This criticism is not a slight to the design team.  I found some of the creature designs and landscapes to be quite good, actually.  But the technical execution of those designs felt thrown together, choppy and poorly incorporated into the fabric of a broader universe.  I could levy this blame on the technical craftsman who developed the CGI effects and who were responsible for assimilating the effects into a practical environment, but it all ends up on the director’s desk.  He is responsible for communicating his vision and molding the work of hundreds of individuals into a cohesive unit that tells a story.

“Clash of the Titans” feels like a hundred different little visions smashing into each other for 106 minutes.

I’ve never claimed to be a cinema elitist.  Sure, I love Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” and Antonioni’s “L’avventura,” but also love “Back to the Future” and “Jaws.”  A good movie is a good movie whether it cost $100 or $100,000,000 to make.  And by every conceivable means of evaluation, “Clash of the Titans” is a terrible movie.