Awful, awful, awful! Dumb as a brick. Was the English language quite so cultured as this ten thousand years ago and did everybody have such perfect teeth? When the villains of the piece appear on horseback to enslave the good guys you immediately smell the rottenness of the script. ("The four leg monsters are approaching". Hunh?) When the hero of the piece falls into a pit where a saber toothed tiger is drowning and says, "I'll help you if you don't eat me" you wonder how nobody could have thunk 'Well gee, is this just too dumb for audiences to swallow?' You half expect the tiger to make some kind of verbal response, which would really have landed us in looney-tunesville. You get the payoff from this scene when the tiger reappears to save the hero from the hands of a native tribe, obliging the hero by again not eating him. In a perpetual pursuit of the kidnapped love interest, after various contrived incidents, including an attack by savage CGI chickens that Colonel Sanders would have been proud of, we wind up in some pseudo-Egyptian, pyramid-building country with some vaguely extra-terrestrial leader who really isn't. In the screening I attended the audience was rolling in the aisles at just how dumb this movie is. The CGI effects? Well, we've seen them all before and it would have been nice to have had some kind of story and characters to back the effects up. And yes, as so many other people have pointed out, it does indeed bear more than a vague resemblance to the Mel Gibson flick Apocalypto, minus the intelligence and story direction. The ending of the movie had everyone in the audience howling with derision. If the makers of this movie were aiming for the lowest common denominator then they have unerringly hit their mark. Hard not to believe that this won't top the worst movie list at year's end.
