Troy

Forget love, honor, power, or glory—epic wars are waged for box-office receipts, and Troy delivers enough mythically inaccurate action to kick off the summer movie-fan spending spree on the right sandaled foot. A Cliff’s Notes version of the Hollywood’s Notes version of Troy (meaning Homer’s The Iliad) goes like this: Pretty-boy Paris (played by pretty-boy Orlando Bloom) steals Menelaus’ wife, Helen (Diane Kruger); a now-pissed Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) enlists the help of his brother Agamemnon (Brian Cox) to marshal his troops for a trip to Troy to bring Helen back; Paris’ brother, Hector (Eric Bana) and badass warrior Achilles (Brad Pitt) wear skirts—oh, and fight on opposite sides. There’s plenty of shirtless posturing by Pitt and a Trojan horse worth of epic-stretching dialogue, but you’ll forgive Troy these sins amid the colossal war scenes, bone-crunching one-on-one face-offs (Pitt vs. Bana, Pitt vs. anonymous big motherfucker, Pitt vs. your girlfriend’s wildest fantasies) and easy-to-understand, if completely misappropriated, classic Greek mythology. We can only hope Hollywood takes note of a writer capable of spinning so intricate a tale of war and revenge and rewards him with a multipicture deal.