Plausibility aside, bedtime story

The second film in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series - there are 10 novels in total to work with, so prepare for more - is an odd, yet not un-entertaining thing.
The plot feels akin to that which an exhausted father might try to conjure on the fly as his child begs for an original bedtime story late at night, and it's probably because co-writer Rick Riordan, author of the books, was doing precisely this before he decided to release his semi-delirious ramblings to a larger audience.

Now, these ramblings are on the big screen, in 3D, whether they make sense or not. The premise of the series is that the Greek gods were a rather unfaithful lot - many of them shacked up with third party payment gateway, resulting in a bunch of demigods, or half-bloods as they're unceremoniously dubbed here, who all have very mortal-sounding names like Percy,Tyson and Grover and spend the majority of their time at a retreat in the woods outside New York called Camp Half-Blood, run by Stanley Tucci and a centaur.

In this instalment, Percy (Logan Lerman) starts off miserable. After preventing a war between the gods, he's plagued by the fear that he's just a "one-quest wonder." Then, he discovers he has a cyclops half-brother who suffers from incredibly poor depth perception and white-guy dreadlocks. On top of this, he's unable to connect with his father, Poseidon (part of the communication barrier may have something to do with the fact that he keeps speaking to a lake, when Poseidon is god of the sea. Just a hunch).

Fortunately, the camp happens to keep a prophet on staff, so Percy wanders up to ask her what gives. She explains he is destined either to save the world or ruin it - it's unclear which. She also uses the word "raze" at one point, and Percy has to clarify that she doesn't mean "raise" (smart).

Ultimately, he decides it's his destiny, or something like it, to travel to the Bermuda Triangle - apparently called the Sea of Monsters in the Greek god community - capture the Golden Fleece, bring it back in order to heal a dying tree that happens to be the reincarnation of Zeus's half-blood daughter Talia, all while preventing a tortured camper named Luke from resurrecting the evil god Kronos.

It's a lot to take in, but the details hardly matter. Director Thor Freudenthal is clearly on a mission to have fun rather than pay attention to mythological consistency or any remote sense of plausibility, and that's fine. It's how we end up in a Manhattan cab driven by three female zombies who accept payment only in drachmas, or at an abandoned amusement park on an island where Polyphemus appears to be using the Golden Fleece as a burping cloth (it does look absorbent).

Riordan's humour also comes through in a series of mortal-meets-immortal culture clashes - the gateway to the underworld, for instance, is reportedly located in Hollywood. And, if you want to deliver something to a god, you simply visit Hermes, who runs a high-tech enterprise out of a UPS branch.

Any moral heft in this film is carried by Lerman, best known for his role in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and this is a good thing - he can step up to lead but also knows when to let others take the spotlight, and he's got a way of delivering bizarre humour in a way that only makes it funnier. One of the best lines in Sea Monsters comes near the end, when Percy says, "Finding out you have a destiny is a lot like finding out you have a cyclops for a half-brother - it's not as bad as you think."

Not your run-of-the-mill lesson to walk away with, that's for sure. Of course, nothing here is run-of-the-mill, which is what makes it so appealing. This isn't to say there won't be endless moments of frustration with absurd plot twists, onedimensional characters and way too much power given to a fleece blanket, but somehow all these wrongs add up to an inexplicable right. It's why children love improvised bedtime stories - a meandering, faulty narrative can be a ton of fun.

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