A week after “How to Train Your Dragon” reminded me how much joy I could get out of a 3-D movie, “Clash of the Titans” comes in and F’s it all up. The decision earlier this year to switch from 2-D to 3-D delivers nothing in terms of thrills and washes out the color, making this a sad-looking sword and sandal epic.

Sam Worthington, establishing himself as the new go-to action guy, ably plays Perseus, the unknowing son of Zeus (Liam Neeson, literally shimmering) who mounts an army in order to save the city of Dargos from the Kraken monster. See, Zeus and God of the underworld, Hades (Ralph Fiennes, looking and sounding like a hunched over version of Voldemort), are sick of the people’s lack of devotion and so they have decided to release the monster unless the people offer up their princess, Andromeda (Alexa Davolos), as sacrifice.

Perseus vows to punish Hades, who killed the fisherman who raised him, and so a long journey begins complete with flying horses and battles with crab monsters, evil witches, and Medusa. At least the 1981 version had fun with its own cheesiness. This is a Michael Bay-ified version of mythology, except to the fair to Michael Bay, he’ll occasionally get an action sequence right. Here even the final battle with the Kraken had me going, “that’s it!”

Director Louis Leterrier’s direction is frenetic, flat, and suspenseless, and the solid visual effects are wasted. The characters are mainly there to be action heroes and the screenplay is seriously humorless yet contains laughably bad lines. The plot is non-existant, not that it would matter if the movie were the least bit fun to watch. “Titans” is a dull remake, it doesn’t matter how many dimensions you add to it.