“Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “300.” “The Man Who Would Be King.” These are some films the makers of “Gods of Egypt” have seen. Unfortunately what they have made is more like the “Battlefield Earth” of sword-and-sorcery movies. Like the lobby of a Donald Trump building, it looks ever so expensive and amazingly cheap at the same time.
The ancient Egyptian fun begins when, on the day the king (Bryan Brown) prepares to pass the crown to his son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), he is instead murdered by his treacherous brother Set (Gerard Butler), who has unexpectedly returned from exile in the Scottish part of Egypt to seize power.
In a ferocious battle in which Set and Horus suddenly shape-shift into metallic giant animals, Horus winds up with no eyes, which is how I wish I’d gone into this movie.
Luckily a mortal boy named Bek (Brenton Thwaites), an expert burglar, manages to rescue one of the magical sparkling eyes from its place amid a deadly series of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style traps. Horus, eager to get his eye back, tries to kill Bek but then secures the eye in a deal to try to retrieve Bek’s former girlfriend (Courtney Eaton) from the land of the dead.
For Horus to exact his revenge against Set has something to do with killing the desert with a drop of magical water scooped up from — where else? — the spaceship captained by the sun god, and Horus’ granddad, Ra (Geoffrey Rush).
Ra, wearing his hair in a blond queue down the back of his neck and wreathed in a kind of Duraflame glow that makes him look like Olivia Newton-John in “Xanadu,” spends his days protecting Egypt by firing his flamethrowing staff at a nefarious smog monster. Rush was Casanova Frankenstein in “Mystery Men” and the voice of Tomar-Re in “The Green Lantern,” and yet I feel confident in declaring this a career low never to be eclipsed in a thousand lifetimes.
But back in Egypt, Horus and Bek join forces with the goddess of love, Hathor (Elodie Yung), whom the former sportingly forgives for having shacked up with the villainous Set while Horus was away. They do battle with gigantic sand snakes that breathe fire, but only when all prey is safely out of range.
Assisted by the god of wisdom (Chadwick Boseman), a swishy fellow in a leather-and-gold nightie who enjoys contemplating the mysteries of lettuce and hangs around with a hundred clones of himself, they confront the riddles of the terrifying sphinx who, when bested, cries, “Oh, bother,” like Winnie the Pooh.
There’s more. Much more, and all of it seemingly dictated by the effects team, presumably while high on mescaline. The script is left merely with tasks like randomly doling out unexplained new magical powers, having characters turn into molten gold animals or shooing everyone along into the next set piece in the flaming-fortress puzzle-pyramid or the obelisk of doom. Assembling all of this into some kind of coherence is not the point; be dazzled or be damned. As one character puts it, “If I ever attempted to explain, your brain would liquefy and run out of your ears.”