Dir. Chris Columbus 119mins, Empire Cinemas, Mar 25

Mashing together the angsty adolescent intrigue of the 'Harry Potter' films (Columbus directed the first two installments) and the frigid-and-proud flag-waving of Twilight’s teenybopper epics, the film focuses on the underachieving Percy (Lerman), who discovers he’s really a sword-swinging demigod; which is what happens when the god Poseidon has a quick fling with a dowdy New York housewife (Keener). When Hades (Coogan) kidnaps uom as a bargaining chip for Zeus’ lost lightning bolt, Percy is charged with finding trinkets scattered across the country in order to avert a crisis on Mount Olympus and save his human kin from eternal damnation.

The film works best when playing on the idea that no amount of bravado is enough to mask our desire for parental love. Yet it’s not enough to compensate for the computer-game-style plotting, which relies on us to pick up narrative nuggets that mechanically slot in like puzzle pieces later on. And then there’s the rampant product placement: apparently, if you’re locked in a life-or-death struggle with Medusa (Thurman), you can avoid her deathly gaze by using an iPod’s shiny backside as a mirror. David Jenkins