***Spoiler Alert
They had The Rock. How do you mess up a movie starring the Rock? Casting Dwayne Johnson as one of the world's most recognizable heroes should have been his capstone role, but instead was plagued by a rushed story, obscure humor, and choppy editing.
Hollywood continues its troubling trend of recasting heroes as villains and villains as heroes in this latest interpretative tome. Hercules is portrayed as a mercenary who gets paid by the rich and keeps it for himself and his motley crue of bandits, sort of like a reinvented Robin Hood. He plans to use his ill-gotten gains to retire quietly one day. Yes, he actually says that in the movie.
The story is not interesting and easy to tune out. The movie opens as Hercules nephew is about to be castrated by an unsavory band of pirates and buys time by charming them with tales of his uncle Hercules amazing triumph over his 12 labors brought on by the vengeful goddess Hera. At any moment, I kept waiting for Zeus or Hera or really any Greek god to appear, but they never do.
Unfortunately, I spent the next 90 minutes expecting one of the gods to appear and spice up the fairly predictable action scenes. Hercules rescues his nephews from the pirates using the behind-the-scenes skills of his gang. Each member has a particular skill. Nothing like teamwork instead of a real super hero.
I was expecting a brand new movie, however this Hercules borrowed heavily from the animated Disney movie, which actually had a better story. This story seemed to rely on the premise that the audience was already familiar with the complete Greek legends of Hercules and decided to simply pick up where the last Hercules production ended. Sort of like, "Whatever happened to Hercules?"
The stellar cast are all well-known actors with tons of accolades under their belts. I wasn't expecting any award winning performances, however, much of the dialogue was clichéd. None of their roles seemed to bring out the best in them. Actually, the ensemble never really seemed to click (i.e. The Avengers). All the actors were forced to utter terrible one-liners that were totally out of character. Whoever heard of a funny Amazon?
I haven't discussed the plot much because it was all over the place. This is not an action movie in the truest sense. There is not a common villain. The villain who actually killed Hercules wife and kids doesn't die in an ironic manner. It's not "300", though it could have been. It lacks the non-stop incredible feats of a Marvel comics superhero. In short, this movie failed to really hit any particular note. It doesn't stand out in any way at all, which was a tremendous disservice to those of us expecting to see the Rock spin/toss some animal by the tail.
It's unclear to me at this stage why the story chose to focus more on a choppy and convoluted double-cross theme than just to focus on Hercules 12 Labors. It would have been far more inspiring and creative to actually see the Rock battle some beast than to be cast in a role of a conflicted good guy/bad guy, which was confusing and disappointing.
If you haven't seen it in theaters, you may certainly wait for DVD/Redbox without feeling that you've missed something momentous. The only thing missing is Hercules, the Hero.
