Starring Sam Worthington, Ralph Fiennes, and Liam Neeson. Rated 14A.

Amid the funhouse of supersized scorpions, killer giant squids, and snake-haired women, you’d think everyone would be having a grand old time. So it’s a surprise to find that in director Louis Leterrier's remake of 1981’s Clash of the Titans, only Ralph Fiennes—the most humourless seeming actor around—seems to be thoroughly enjoying his cheese.

As Hades, Zeus’s bad-ass brother, he flies around maniacally, cloaked in tendrils of black smoke and cinder and hissing lines like: “Watch while my blessed avenger devours their hope and then you will know my pain!” But elsewhere, Brit-accented thesps do an almost reverent take on the original popcorn movie by stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen.

This is not to say the new, CGI-cranked 3-D Clash of the Titans isn’t entertaining in a sword-fighting, Kraken-unleashing kind of way. It follows demigod Perseus (Sam Worthington), who leads a ragtag (and highly expendable) army on a journey to defeat the Kraken, the sea monster that gets sicked on the folk of Argon when the gods—including his own father, Zeus—feel dissed. Perseus’s quest takes them on some visually wild adventures, shown at their best in a terrifying Medusa, whose anacondalike body slithers around Grecian pillars, and a sequence that finds Perseus soaring on Pegasus in and out of whipping Kraken tentacles. But not all of the effects are as effective: watching Zeus stand in his disco-ball armour amid the hazy-lit realm of Mount Olympus will remind you of Marlon Brando’s digs in that other exercise in ’80s excess, Superman. And not in a good way.

The story is outrageous, and yet Avatar’s Worthington is oddly dull, taking a grim, soldierlike (and Aussie-accented) approach to his role. The overall tone just doesn’t feel quite giddy or campy enough—more Starship Troopers, less Lord of the Rings, please.