'Immortals': mythological hooey

The withering, gratuitous violence of "Immortals" is of a type better suited to a horror movie, but that's a separate issue -- almost. Certainly, the swords-and-sandals spectacle is ripe for the kind of vast, epic, overpopulated remake that computer graphics now make possible (a la "300"), but we don't end up having the same relationship to the resulting movie. The artificiality of the 3-D "Immortals" -- in which the slave Theseus (Henry Cavill) swears vengeance against the rampaging King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), who intends to enslave the earth and free the Titans (who will then defeat the Olympians) -- is such that human beings almost feel like unwelcome intrusions on virtual Greece. If violence seems to be a way to bridge the real and virtual worlds, it's understandable, but strategically unsound.

Much of the movie is inadvertently comic -- the way the dialogue swings between the slangy modern and the theatrically "classical," or the presentation of the virgin (not for long) Oracle, played by Freida Pinto, who's in a race with Jennifer Aniston for worst career moves. If you're even vaguely familiar with Greek mythology, forget it (Hyperion was a Titan; Theseus was the mythic founder of Athens). That Stephen Dorff's Stavros, an ally of Theseus, keeps hitting on the Oracle and her sidekicks is funny, and suggests a movie that doesn't happen -- one where the flat conventions of heroic action-adventure are leavened by wit. Doesn't happen, although whenever he's on the scene, Rourke makes you suspect that comedy is lurking around the next Corinthian column.

PLOT In mythological days of yore, a warrior slave in cahoots with Mount Olympus leads the resistance against a brutal warlord. RATING R (violence, sexual situations)

CAST Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto, Stephen Dorff.

LENGTH 1:45

PLAYING AT Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE Overly computerized hooey with a sadistic streak.