The Legend Of Hercules

The story of director Renny Harlin’s rise and fall is already something of a Greek Tragedy; hitting high notes with the likes of Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea and The Long Kiss Goodnight, he went on to direct Cutthroat Island which essentially bankrupted an entire Hollywood production company, and ever since he’s been stuck making crappy horrors you’ve never seen or heard of (Mindhunters, The Covenant, Exorcist: The Beginning) and crappy action films you’ve never seen or heard of (12 Rounds, 5 Days Of War). And so it continues with The Legend Of Hercules, a new career low on his CV currently littered with career lows.

Kellan Lutz plays Hercules, son of King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins), who doesn’t much care for Hercules because he’s not actually his son, but the result of a one night stand his wife had with Zeus. Hercules is in love with Hebe (Gaia Weiss), but she’s just been promised to his half-brother Iphicles (Liam Garrigan), while Hercules gets sent off to battle, captured, sold into slavery, becomes a great gladiator, and fights his way back to the capital to return to the woman he loves.

Pretty basic plotting there, so what could possibly go wrong? As it turns out: Everything.

Let’s start out with Kellan Lutz, skin bronzed into a colour never seen within the natural spectrum, buffed up and incapable of delivering a single aspect of emotion, constantly looking and acting like he’s wandering around on the world’s biggest gay porno set. The healthy $70 million budget looks like it was spent entirely on his lip gloss, as the SyFy-channel CGI and terrible, Bulgaria-set action sequences look shockingly cheap and flimsy. When the scene arrives of Hercules wrestling a CGI lion and killing it with a headlock, you’ll know that this was not a film made with love and passion.

With so many obvious “influences” (read: straight up rip-offs) to be found through, such as 300, Ben-Hur, Spartacus (both the movie and the TV series), Gladiator, etc, you would think that The Legend Of Hercules would have at least got something accidentally right. But we’re afraid that simple isn’t the case, as this movie is completely devoid of anything recommendable.