In long beards, the two veteran actors are suited to one another, like a divine ZZ Top.

Camp is a part of the experience here, as both "Titans" films pull from an unlikely combination of traditions: ancient Greece and the 1980s. The clunky "Clash of the Titans" remade the 1981 original, bringing in boatloads of box office by updating the schmaltzy Laurence Olivier version with contemporary digital effects and a widely decried, slapped on conversion to 3-D.

"Wrath of the Titans," directed by Jonathan Liebesman taking over for Louis Leterrier, has modestly improved upon the 3-D this time around and better manages a narrative flow of continuous fantasy action.

But that's also all there is: A charmless stream of battle and fight sequences that contorts mythic characters into blockbuster conventions. It's comically late — literally the last few minutes — that the film even tries to slide emotion into the characters' relations, as if attempting to hypnotize us before leaving the theater: Oh, that was a love story? And that guy — gasp! — was supposed to be the funny one?

Rather than yet more Kraken releasing ("Release, um, another Kraken!"), "Wrath of the Titans," written by Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson, charts new ground for the demigod Perseus (Sam Worthington). Going beyond the original "Clash," written by Beverley Cross, our distance from the original myths grows still more.