I watched "The Return" and it made me so mad, you guys

How could a movie starring a jacked Ralph Fiennes as an aging Odysseus possibly be bad? This is how.

There’s something especially infuriating about a bad movie that should have been good. Especially when you know that the source material is good. Like, famously and enduringly good over the course of many centuries. This is why I’m so angry at “The Return,” the 2024 film starring Ralph Fiennes as a haunted yet impressively shredded Odysseus finally returning home to Ithaca after 20 years to set his house in order via righteous acts of violence.

Maybe you, like me, recall seeing the stills of Fiennes getting himself into incredible shape for this role at the age of sixty-fucking-two (62!). Maybe you also thought, wow this is going to be great. Not just because the big homie Ralph got all cut up on some straight Rocky IV shit, but because he’s a great actor who is great in everything he does (even the bad stuff) and this is a great idea for a movie.

After all, The Odyssey is too big and sprawling to fit into one movie. The closest anyone has come to doing it right is the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante, and that took two separate nights of primetime network TV. Choosing instead to focus only on the fraught homecoming is actually an amazing idea for one feature film. And who better than a chiseled Ralph fucking Fiennes to star in it??

(Did I mention he’s ripped in this? Because my man is sliced and diced here. And he’s basically a senior citizen. Which leads me to a personal belief that actually ought to be a law: Any time an actor/musician/influencer or whoever does a press tour showing off their “body transformation,” they should be required to tell us EVERYTHING they did to help them get there. You know what I mean. Ralph had to be on some of that good-good to show up looking like this. I’m not mad at him for it. But if you’re going to brag, be real about it is all I’m saying. Don’t act like this was all the work of chicken breasts and brown rice and cable rows when you know damn well that modern chemistry deserves a nod for its supporting role in this particular work.)

(Looking pretty snatched and vascular there for a 62-year-old man, dog…)

Sadly, this movie is not good. I should have known that simply from the fact that, after the internet hubbub caused by those photos of Ripped Fiennes, I heard nothing at all about the film until I saw it was available on streaming. (Oop, there goes my phone alert reminder to cancel that free trial of Paramount+, so thanks Past Ben.)

The film has several problems, most of which are forgivable. For one thing it looks cheap, just from the way it’s shot. There are also way too many little things that shatter the illusion of this Ancient Greek world (at one point I said out loud, “is that guy wearing gym shorts??”).

But the biggest and least forgivable flaw is that this is a version of The Odyssey that does not include the Greek gods and goddesses. Like, at all. Not only do they not show up and interact/interfere with this world, as they do in the original story (kind of a lot!), they are never even mentioned. You don’t even get a shepherd saying some shit like, “Praise Zeus” in passing or whatever. This is a version of the Ancient Greek world that is wholly devoid of religion, which is stupid for a couple different reasons.

The big one is that, from a practical sense, this story does not hold together without the very real existence and involvement of the gods. Removing them means removing the supernatural elements of the story, which leaves gaping fucking plot holes.

For instance, we see Odysseus wash up on the rocky shores of Ithaca, his island home, 20 years after he left to fight in the Trojan War. No one seems to recognize him. In the original, this is because Athena helpfully disguises him as a beggar. Here, no disguise. Just a beard and age, which, fine, maybe that would be enough if this weren’t Ralph goddamn Fiennes, who we’ve seen in movies for the last 30 years or so. You know how I know I’d still recognize Ralph Fiennes after two decades? Because I do. I never need to be told when Ralph Fiennes is in a movie. He shows up and I immediately go, oh there’s Ralph Fiennes. And that’s before he even starts talking. You don’t think Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, might have been similarly famous on his home island??

But also, without the existence of the gods how do you explain where he’s been all this time? The Trojan War ended 10 years ago. All the other Greeks who lived to see the end of it have done been home for a while now. Odysseus shows up a decade late, alone, without his ship or any of his men. If you know it’s because Poseidon was holding a grudge and wouldn’t let him traverse the wine-dark sea in peace, sure, that makes sense. And if you know about the goddamn cyclops and Circe’s island and Scylla and Charybdis and the cattle of the sun god and all the rest of it, you understand why he alone survived. Without that explanation, he just seems like a guy who did an extremely bad job of bringing his crew across a narrow stretch of ocean and back home to their families. He seems incompetent rather than heroic.

There’s a deeper reason why removing the supernatural from this story diminishes it. What “The Return” appears to be going for is gritty realism. This Odysseus is haunted and glowering (so much silent glowering in the flickering firelight in this film). But it’s not because he’s been broken and humbled by a series of gods who were peeved at his hubris (personally I like to imagine Poseidon as a member of Tony Soprano’s crew, watching Odysseus from afar like, “the bawls on this fucking guy!”), but because he’s got PTSD. He saw some shit over in Troy, man. Lost a lot of good men over there. He learned that war is hell.

By far the best scene in the entire movie is when Odysseus (glowering into a fire, natch) tells the local shepherds and swineherds who’ve taken him in about the day the Greeks breached the walls of Troy. Odysseus, he explains in the third person (because he’s pretending very unconvincingly to be just a random guy who was part of the army, you see) thought up a “clever trick.” He got them inside the walls. And then they slaughtered everyone — men, women, children — in the streets of Troy. Then they burned this great city to the ground.

The way Fiennes delivers these lines, there’s a bitterness to it. It’s Odysseus sitting there, hearing the songs of glory and tales of his own genius, and thinking about the horrors he has wrought. Oh yes, you can feel him telling himself. Aren’t you clever. And look what it got you.

This does succeed in giving Odysseus some new depth, but only to a point. There’s so much more of that to explore when you just stick to the original story.

I first read The Odyssey in a college literature course taught by a delightfully weird Ichabod Crane-type motherfucker by the name of Stephen-Paul Martin. I loved this man. Great teacher, utterly bizarre writer. (I read a couple of his short story collections after he mentioned in class that he occasionally wrote fiction and I was like wow, these stories don’t do any of the things I think stories are supposed to do and yet I am riveted.) He was the one who pointed out that, by the time Odysseus gets home, not only has he had sex with goddesses and confronted actual monsters, which can’t help but change a man, but he’s also visited the underworld and spoken to the ghosts of his friends.

Think about that for a second. He went to the afterlife as a tourist. He saw that it kind of sucks. He talked to Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, the dude who wanted everlasting glory and ecstatic, bloody revenge — and got them both! But in the underworld he tells Odysseus straight to his face that those were stupid things to want. All he wants now is to be alive again. Being dead is a garbage-ass experience, 0/10, would not recommend.

Then Odysseus returns to the land of the living and has to, what, go about the rest of his life with this knowledge? That’s fucked up, man. He’s seen where he’s headed. He knows that no amount of great deeds or charitable works can really change much about it (though bad deeds could make it worse — shouts out to Sisyphus). He, too, will become a pale, bloodless shadow of his self when his time comes. He knows that now. He knows exactly what it will look like, even. Whatever else he does and wherever he goes after that, you’re talking about a haunted motherfucker right there.

You lose all that in this what-if-their-world-was-just-like-ours version of the story. Then it’s just about a guy who comes home and takes forever to finally get around to killing all the dickheads who’ve been terrorizing his wife and son. And the moments where gritty realism might actually be useful — the scene where he slaughters the suitors, for instance, imagine the sheer amount of blood and guts and wailing and human misery that would have entailed — is played like an unrealistically quick and easy action montage we’re just trying to hurry up and get through.

What a wasted opportunity to make a good movie. And that’s what makes me so mad. You had everything in your favor. You had Ralph Fiennes. You had a visually striking Greek island setting. You had one of the most famous and long-running IP franchises of all time, behind perhaps only The Bible and Fast & Furious. And what did you do, director Uberto Pasalini? You fucked it all up. You better hope the gods aren’t real, my man. Because you’d be headed for some punishment in the underworld for this one.