Hercules
Director: Brett Ratner
Cast Headliner: Dwayne Johnson
Original Release Date: July 25, 2014
Hollywood is filled with all kinds of reboots and
remakes, but one of the oldest characters OF ALL TIME is Hercules. He’s had
tales told about him for literally many hundreds of years, and here we are with
yet another one. But this one will be
different because it has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson right? Well, he’s a good asset but otherwise this
film is even more generic and stale than the Scorpion King movies.
Apparently the movie is based upon Radical Comics “Hercules:
The Thracian Wars” graphic novel series so there are some twists to this
ancient tale. Hercules/(The Rock) may or may not be the true son of Zeus since
the film has a unclear message about whether the myths and gods are true. Don’t
expect to see Hercules fighting cool creatures much since that’s only in a
short series of montages and dreams, the trailer lied to audiences.
The story that is here is about Hercule’s mercenary band
(?!?!!?) who have more (slightly) more flavor than the hero. There’s future
vision seeing Amphiaraus (Ian McShane), knife using short tempered
Autolycus(Rufus Sewell), beastly norseman-like Tydeus(Aksel Hennie), Amazon women archer Atalanta(Ingrid Bolso
Berdal), and Hercules’ nephew (?!?!) Iolaus (Reece Ritchie). They work for Lord
Cotys(John Hurt) to defend the Greek city-state of Thrace from invaders.
These one-note players are interesting because they at
least embody their traits hard, if sometimes to the point of annoyance. This is unlike Hercules. Because sure he is
strong and fierce and boisterous, but only barely so. The usually entertaining
Johnson gives off here one of his most basic performances in his career, not
seen since his early WWE days. He’s decent, but that’s it. At least he … looks cool in his costume?
The characters are dumb, the story is dumb, but what is
entertaining is the action. This redeems the film and sure it’s all human on
human scuffles but there manages to be a plentiful variety of action sequences.
Big dumb moments happen, such as when
Hercules punches an enemy yards backwards with merely his fist. But it’s all
part of the expectations of this formula. One can’t say the movie isn’t at least a bit
entertaining.
This movie could have been so much more, but it’s not
horrible. The spectacle of the clashing armies is cool and there are actually a
couple of surprising twists in the plot. Dwayne Johnson is of course decent when
fighting against armies, but is even better when the rare emotional scenes
about his departed family arise. There
are a couple gems in this rough film, and it should have had more. But still a
good “rental” movie or so. 7.06 out of
10
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