gods of egypt | What to Watch

(Image credit: © 2014 Summit Entertainment, LL)

This enjoyably trashy fantasy adventure, starring Gerard Butler, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Brendan Thwaites, plunders ancient Egyptian mythology with go-for-broke abandon

This enjoyably trashy fantasy adventure, starring Gerard Butler, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Brendan Thwaites, plunders ancient Egyptian mythology with go-for-broke abandon.

It’s all totally bonkers, with feuding 12-foot-tall deities, plucky mortals, desperate quests and as much energetically schlocky action as a multi-million dollar budget will buy.

Good taste may not get a look in, but the rumbustious action is hugely entertainingly as Thwaites' crafty young thief strives to aid Coster-Waldau's deposed god against usurper Butler in return to free his murdered beloved (Courtney Eaton) from the underworld.

Along the way, there is a harum-scarum raid on a booby-trapped vault right out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an encounter with the riddling Sphinx and a desert showdown with a pair of warlike goddesses riding giant fire-breathing serpents.

Though saddled with modern slang and accents that veer all over the Anglophone globe, the actors enter into the film's spirit. Butler, Scottish brogue defiantly intact, charges along with gusto, while Geoffrey Rush lends hammy conviction to the spaceship-piloting god Ra. The women have less to do, but French-Cambodian Elodie Yung stands out as imperious Hathor, goddess of love.