Hercules [M]

All of Greece knows the legends, but is Hercules really the son of Zeus or just an incredibly strong mercenary out for gold? Running from past ghosts, Hercules and his band of followers are employed by Lord Cotys to stop the ‘sorcerer’, Rhesus, from destroying any more villages within his lands. But along the way, a bigger conspiracy comes into view and it’s time for Hercules to become the legendary hero whom everyone believes him to be. 

It’s a universal truth that there are just some movies that you go to see simply because they look SO BAD! My reasons for sitting down and watching (the larger portion of) Hercules this afternoon was because my boyfriend and I were in the mood to see a movie and this was the earliest one playing. Whilst neither of us really gave two shits and, admittedly, missed large chunks of narrative and action due to physical attraction (there’s always a couple in the movie theatre that spends the running time making out), I can still satisfactorily report that we did watch the majority of the movie and found it to be absolute crap (only made endurable by our comparing it to The Lego Movie)! 

Armed with a terrible script, mediocre performances, and more or less absolutely nothing in terms of interest, Hercules is an epic fail of mythological proportions! 

All of Greece knows the legends, but is Hercules really the son of Zeus or just an incredibly strong mercenary out for gold? Running from past ghosts, Hercules and his band of followers are employed by Lord Cotys to stop the ‘sorcerer’, Rhesus, from destroying any more villages within his lands. But along the way, a bigger conspiracy comes into view and it’s time for Hercules to become the legendary hero whom everyone believes him to be. 

Troy, Clash of the Titans, and now Hercules, there is yet to be a movie about Greek or Romance mythology that has a decent or even relatively appropriate script! If memory serves me correctly, I got peeved at Clash of the Titans for using the word ‘bitch’ in the script, but this movie takes the cake by featuring the line, “fucking centaurs”. WHAT!!!!??? Not anywhere in Greek literature is ‘fuck’ featured within the vocabulary so why, for the life of Brian, WHY do screenwriters insist on plonking it into movies like this?! But it has to be said that the script was screwed right from the off. The story starts with a bit of merit: a back-story, the cool legends of Hercules, and then it progresses to reveal that he may not be the son of Zeus, but a con-man and the legends are all hearsay spewed from the silver-tongued mouth of his nephew to incite fear and admiration. There’s some intrigue in this, I grant you. The narrative then flows along with conventional plot devices leading to a task, realisation, confrontation, and finally resolution. It seemed to me that the writers got a quarter of the way through and then the spark fizzled out completely. The story soon becomes grizzly but with a sugar coated moral that worked much better in The Lego Movie! 

To give credit where credit is due, the actors worked relatively well with what they had and the special effects for the training and battle sequences were rather impressive. But, at the end of the day, this movie is pretty effing bad: so much so that it’s actually hilarious. 

Starring Dwayne Johnson, Ian McShane,John Hurt, Rufus Sewell, Aksel Hennie, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Reece Ritchie, Joseph Fiennes, Tobias Santelmann, and Rebecca Ferguson, Hercules is a mindless action drone filled with war, bloodshed, mythology, action, and comedy. You come to appreciate the magnitude of the script when you see a film like this. I don’t think any Oscar-winning performance could turn this into a good movie purely because the script is SO BAD! I cannot, however, say that I am disappointed because the film looked pretty crap from its trailers so... yeah.