Hercules

Coming fast on the Achilles heel (sorry) of The Legend Of Hercules, this outing ups the ante on all fronts. Johnson, Hurt, and McShane, joined by Joseph Fiennes and Peter Mullan, are the marquee names that Kellan Lutz, Gaia Weiss et al were not, and even director-for-hire Brett Ratner is, lately, an improvement on Renny Harlin, although Ratner’s best (Red Dragon, Tower Heist) doesn’t match Harlin in his prime (Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2, Long Kiss Goodnight). Despite the elevation in talent, Hercules is far too familiar for its own good.

Forgoing all that hero of the Twelve Labours nonsense by adapting Steve Moore’s deconstructionist series of comics, this Hercules is a mercenary, using the myth to scare bad guys and drive up the price of his quests. He and his band of warriors - Sewell’s Spartan, McShane’s seer, and Ingrid Bolso Berdal’s Amazonian archer among them - are employed to aid the besieged Lord Cotys (Hurt) who awaits the armies of the marauding Rhesus (Tobias Santelmann)…

Problems abound. Everything that goes down has been recycled from elsewhere. There’s the training montage, the rousing battle speech, the gallows humour in the face of unsurmountable odds, the mute one who speaks at a decisive moment, the selfish one who abandons the quest only to come back at a decisive moment, etc etc. There is even a direct lift from a Troy fight scene, a gag from Braveheart is shamelessly stolen.

Maybe more scenes are pinched but because the 3D darkens everything - far, far more than usual - it’s hard to tell. One expects a certain dimming of the visuals with those damn glasses, but one does not expect to see sunny Greece look this overcast and dull.

But the always-watchable Johnson and his co-stars save proceedings when it’s in danger of becoming tedious. The twist on the legend of Hercules is welcome too, even if there is something Liberty Valance about it all. Ratner has fun with the battles (three big ones if you’re counting), doing what he can to make them as violent as possible while being entirely bloodless as to appease the 12A rating; apparently you can say ‘f**k and have a chariot with spears on its wheels slice through a line of warriors as long as you don’t see any blood. Hmm.