Once upon a time, after having been pretty much housebound for most of a week, I decided to go to the movies and wound up seeing The Legend of Hercules. No particular desire on my part to see it, but equally, none to avoid it, and the showtime was convenient.
If you’re looking for the story of Hercules’ early years, forget it. Greek mythology and the legends of Hercules are not part of this film. The story gives us, first, the conquest of Argos by the king of Tiryns, Amphitryon (Scott Adkins), in what I suppose is meant to be a revelation of character. Then we are treated to a scene of his queen, Alcmene (Roxanne McKee), being ravished by Zeus (who is invisible), with, astoundingly enough, the connivance of Hera, who hated Hercules in the real myth. Sure enough, shortly thereafter, Alcmene gives birth to a son, whom Amphitryon names Alcides, but whose real name is Hercules.
Cut to twenty years later. Hercules (Kellan Lutz) is in love with Hebe (Gaia Weiss), the princess of Crete, who returns his feelings but is promised to his older brother Iphicles (Liam Garrigan), who’s a real piece of work. Amphitryon, in order to clear away any potential challenge to his rule and the succession, sends Hercules with one of his commanders, Sotiris (Liam McIntyre), and an insufficient number of troops to the relief of the city of Heliopolis in Egypt. (Don’t ask me why the king of Tiryns is sending troops to aid in the rebellion of an Egyptian city – I have no idea.) They are, of course, betrayed, and Hercules and Sotiris, the only survivors of their party, are sold into slavery as gladiators. Needless to say, they eventually make their way back to Greece, earn their freedom, and make short work of both Amphitryon and Iphicles.
Let’s start with the bones: the script is so relentlessly trite that the movie is just one long episode of déjà vu: it’s the B movie version of every Greek story from the 1950s and ‘60s brought back to life, along with references to some classics — Ben Hur (galley slaves), Lawrence of Arabia (endless desert sands), and a few that are more contemporary — 300, and even the Thor franchise, except that this version has nothing to do with any Hercules that anyone’s ever heard of. (I have a rule, which I may have mentioned before: If you have a time-honored story from myth, legend, or folklore, don’t screw with it. It’s been around for a while – it works. Treat it respectfully.) A B-movie retread might have been fun, if it didn’t take itself so seriously.
Given the banality of the script (and the dialogue is, shall I say, not particularly sparkling), it’s hard to know what kind of job the actors are doing – they don’t have much to work with. Regrettably, I didn’t believe for a moment that Kellan Lutz was the son of a god. Although saddled with stereotypical roles, both Garrigan and Weiss do manage to bring a little bit of depth to their characters, as does McKee. A little bit. Adkins is, on the other hand, thoroughly believable as Amphitryon, although at most two-dimensional – Amphitryon doesn’t have a lot of depth to begin with. The same fate befalls McIntyre as Sotiris, who is really no more than the Loyal Sidekick. The secondary characters are cartoons.
The pacing is decent, and the film keeps moving fairly well, although I don’t understand the rationale behind throwing slow-motion sequences into the action scenes, unless it’s to give us a good take on the acrobatics – lots of leaping and somersaulting involved in the fights, and it does make sense in context, but the slow-motion just interrupts the flow. (And there are one or two places where the slow-motion seems pretty random, including one bit early on that I guess was meant as a heads-up – “Here’s a clue!” – but it was lost.)
All in all, this film could have been about any action hero – it’s that generic.
(Millennium Films, 2014) Full credits at IMDb.
