Movie #2 of our back-to-back horrible movie-fest.  We were gunning for Survivor (Kevin Sorbo!!!) but the screen times didn’t work out.  Oh well, we thought, this movie should be just as bad.

Here’s my round-up of Brett Ratner (the moron who ruined the X-Men franchise with X-Men: The Last Stand)’s Hercules.

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

The story is based on a book called Hercules: The Thracian Wars.  I don’t know if the film followed the book’s story word for word (highly doubtful) but the plot, down to its most basic, is that Hercules (Dwayne Johnson – The Scorpion King), after being sent to exile by Athenian King Eurystheus (Joseph Fiennes – Shakespeare In Love) for the murder of his wife and children, is now roaming the lands with his rag-tag group of friends – seer Amphiarus (Ian McShane – Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides), gold-hungry Autolycus (Rufus Sewell – A Knight’s Tale), crazed Tydeus (Aksel Hennie – Headhunters), female Legolas Atalanta (Ingrid Bolso Berdal – Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and his nephew-slash-public relations agent Iolaus (Reece Ritchie – Prince od Persia: The Sands of Time) – as mercenaries for hire who kill for privare lords.   Iolaus uses his gift for gab to build up Hercules’s half-god reputation so that not only do they get a higher price for their services, they also render their marks useless because of fear.

When Ergenia (Rebecca Ferguson – The White Queen), daughter of Lord Cotys (John Hurt – Snowpiercer), hires them to rid of a rebellion in his lands, they learn the hard way that not all things are what they seem.

THE GOOD:

1. Rufus Sewell!!! Mostly because this is the first time I’ve seen him in a non-villainous role.  He has great comedic timing and he’s handsome as fuck – why isn’t he in more roles like this?
2. Rebecca Ferguson is sooo pretttty.  Acting was okay and the screams of horror were very much spot on.
3. There was no romantic angle.  Thank the Lord for small favors.
4. The cast seemed to have had a good time.  They obviously knew it’s a silly movie and they looked like they enjoyed being part of something not incredibly serious.

THE BAD:

1. The waste of talent.  Come on, how could you to this to Ian McShane, John Hurt and Joseph Fiennes?  Did they desperately need the money that they stooped down to this?  Don’t even get me started on Joseph Fiennes’ blonde hair.
2. A very dry soundtrack.  I think that the movie felt more boring than it actually is because of the incredibly dry musical scores.  My friend who came from the night shift actually dozed off a couple of times during the movie.
3. Barely passable action sequences.  You don’t go into movies like this for the story; you go in for the action.  Unfortunately the film didn’t offer very much, and what was served was boring and generic.  I honestly can’t remember a sequence that stood out.

THE UGLY:

1. Too much cheese.  It seems like Brett Ratner can’t make anything without the cheesiness overload.  That type of style worked in the nineties (as proven by his hit Rush Hour) but wouldn’t hold up in the new millenium (as proven by pretty much everything he’s done afterwards).  He just took it too seriously, you know?  The movie could’ve been way more fun if he just joined his cast and just chilled.
2. The giant gaping plot arc that they did not explore and just left hanging there.  I’m guessing that the film makers thought themselves poignant by leaving it open like that.  The whole ‘is he or is he not a demi-god’ mystery obviously was one of the few elements they picked up from the book, but given everything else in the movie, honestly it felt like an something from another film altogether.

All in all Hercules was a meh type of movie.  I mean, it didn’t disappoint us much because we knew what we were signing up for, but there is all sorts of awful to be said for a film when She’s Dating the Gangster ends up being the more interesting movie.  Don’t get me wrong, the acting (for the most part) was pretty good and even the times it wasn’t was salvageable because the cast was obviously having a laugh (at themselves, I’m guessing, for even signing up for this) but the film makers were just too hell-bent into making it into something it was not.  If they had cast another actor as the lead and expounded more the whole man-versus-myth arc, then maybe it could have worked.  But to make something like that you’d need a director with enough chops to handle that kind of project and Brett Ratner is definitely not their man.

THE VERDICT: 4/10.  Skip it.

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.