Hercules
Director: Brett Ratner
(Blu-ray/DVD)
D-
As reimagined by director Brett Ratner, Hercules is half-god, half-human and all but a lost cause. Hardly under-represented in cinema history, the mythological hero has been embraced by the public consciousness worldwide for centuries, largely through the “12 labors” tales that found him battling a three-headed dog and slaying the Hydra. Assuming you ditch the one about Herc having to clean stables in a day’s time, these stories are arguably the most ripe for screen adaptations; naturally, Ratner does away with them in the prologue, showing us only pieces of a few, like a greatest-hits reel. Tellingly, these are the high points of the film’s trailer, so you’re in for a long 98 minutes.
Based on Radical Comics’ series, this Hercules toils for gold as a freelance mercenary (characters spit that word like a slur, the way “liberal” is used today), despite being the son of Zeus. The story’s stone wheels start moving when Herc is hired by Lord Cotys (John Hurt, V for Vendetta) to help quell a civil war in Thrace. With half a dozen special-skilled sidekicks (Dark City’s Rufus Sewell and Deadwood’s Ian McShane among the most notable) supporting him, Herc preps for battle by donning the skin of a vicious lion he once killed, draping it over his head the way preschoolers do security blankets. Speaking of animals, Herc later punches wolves.
Although with little variety from one to the next, the war sequences are staged with far greater competence than Ratner’s track record with action would have us expect — at least any action scene not involving Jackie Chan’s dazzling acrobatics, that is. But lordy, is this epic dull. More mortal than its main character, the film is doomed from the start when two CGI snakes look as if they were created on an iPhone app someone downloaded for free through a Starbucks promotion. Shorn nearly completely of the fantastical elements that make previous Hercules flicks such a hoot to watch — Cannon’s early ’80s pair of Lou Ferrigno vehicles, in particular — this massively budgeted monstrosity fails to muster any significant feelings beyond boredom and contempt. It’s even too soulless to be fun, for which, all other things being equal, I gladly would have settled. By comparison, Dwayne Johnson’s similar-in-appearance Scorpion King is Raiders of the Lost Ark.
None of this is Johnson’s fault; as always, the guy perspires charisma. Ratner errs in letting too much humor show through, to where everyone is at the ready with a quip engineered for pandering laughter, which would be a masterstroke if the Rush Hour conductor were making — or remaking — Hercules in New York. He was not. He made an action-adventure summer blockbuster so beholden to mass appeal, each reel has been cast in that Jerry Bruckheimer-favored Instagram filter marked “Weasel Piss.”
To be fair, Ratner’s Hercules is more watchable than 2014’s competing Greco-Roman project, Renny Harlin’s The Legend of Hercules. (To be fair again, Harlin left the bar set at ground-level.) This Herc pic is so far from mighty, Greece is not the word.
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This random movie review escaped from the archives of Flick Attack.
