If Hollywood isn't careful, Clash of the Titans is exactly the sort of movie that could kill the 3-D boom. Though entertaining it never even remotely rises above mediocrity and yet here it is all bundled up as a massive event picture of the highest order.

This, of course, is nothing new. Hollywood has been packaging dreck as the biggest, best and shiniest new thing ever since Jaws cemented the concept of the blockbuster. The problem here is that, in a clear effort to ride on the coat tails of Avatar, the producers of Clash of the Titans - like the producers of Alice In Wonderland before them - took a film shot in 2-D and gave it a rushed re-do in post production to transform it into three ticket-price-boosting dimensions. And though though paying audiences may not realize ahead of time which films started life as 2-D pictures only to be converted later they sure as hell CAN tell that films processed this way don't look very impressive at all.  Alice did an okay job of the 3-D conversion as these things go but Clash of the Titans certainly doesn't. The effects are dingy and flat and nowhere near impressive enough to justify the boosted admission price and - if anything - actually make a lot of weaknesses in the art design more apparent than they need to be.

In the wake of Avatar's success expect a load of these sorts of post-converted films over the next year before the onslaught of ACTUAL 3-D films arrives. But by the time that wave hits audiences may very well prove tired of these pale imitations and sour on the experience in general. 'Cause nobody likes paying a premium for a sub-standard experience.

But on to the film itself. Discovered floating in a sealed coffin as an infant by a poor fisherman, Perseus has been raised not knowing anything about his true origins. That is, he knows nothing until a brewing conflict between humanity and the Olympian gods leaves his adopted family dead and Hades himself declaring Perseus the bastard son of Zeus. Cue angry quest for revenge, a quest that - if he succeeds - will have the added benefit of saving a city and possibly the entire population of the planet from destruction.

There are an awful lot of good - and even some great - actors in Louis Leterrier's re-do of the classic fantasy film and every last one of them is let down by a clunky script riddled with horrible dialogue and plot holes you could drive a mid-sized vehicle through. Example: when setting off on his quest Perseus is told that his first stop is enormously far away. So far in fact that nobody from the city of Argos has ever ventured so far. Yes, truly this is an epic journey. Everybody packs and sets out. Grunt soldier asks the leader how long it'll take to get there. Four days. Walking. At a slow pace. This is epic? Really? Throw in that they are supposed to have ten days to get there and back before destruction but Persus actually runs out of time on Day Five and a host of similar issues scattered throughout the entire film and it's obvious that the most epic thing here was the need for a script editor. Everyone struggles with the wooden dialogue that they're handed and characters are so poorly developed that many appear and disappear without making any impact while those that matter all appear accompanied by a minute long speech, or so, clearly meant to explain who they are. Bad script. Just bad.

Art direction is similarly clunky. Sword and sorcery pictures are - in my opinion - the hardest genre by a mile to get looking right and believable on screen. Leterrier doesn't.  It comes close from time to time but the design is just strangely off, the rotoscoping is bad, the matte paintings are obvious and out of proportion - I believe this is an unforeseen consequence of the 3-D conversion messing with the perspective - and almost all of these iconic characters have looked far better and far more iconic in other appearances.

Action? Not as much as you'd think and staged too quickly and cut too rapidly to really take advantage of the 3-D. Note to prospective film makers: Action is by far the hardest thing to accomplish well in 3-D. It needs to be planned and staged meticulously to take advantage of the 3-D technology. This, obviously, does not happen in movies that are shot in 2-D and then converted.

And yet, despite all of this - despite the fact that this is, by any objective measure, a bad movie - Clash of the Titans is also strangely entertaining.  It's not bad on the so-bad-it's-good scale, just entertaining in a safely mediocre way. And, because of that - coupled with the massive marketing push - it's almost certainly going to make a big bucket of money. People are going to see it opening weekend and it's not bad enough that those who do will actively discourage their friends from seeing it later. It's gonna roll on to be a big success. But a week after seeing it? A month after that? There'll be that much less sheen on the 3-D experience. If they go to the well too often, Hollywood is just going to drain it dry.