Talk about counter-programming nightmares: Director Alex Proyas (The Crow and I, Robot) brings his gamer-like action-fantasy precision to this mythic adventure about a thief (Brenton Thwaites) who teams up with the Egyptian god Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to save the land from Set (Gerard Butler), another far-more despotic god in the pantheon. While it is admirable to release a mindless CGI-fest the same weekend as the Oscars, whose bright idea was it to feature an almost exclusively white cast — with Chadwick Boseman as the notable exception — at a time when all of the attention has been on the #OscarsSoWhite movement? (Opens wide Friday) (PG-13) Not screened in time for review
This article appears in Feb 24 – Mar 2, 2016.