Film review: The Legend of Hercules
If only The Legend of Hercules flexed its muscles as much as its main character, maybe everything would have been fine. The film has no depth and even lacks a surface: Even though most of the images in this piece of fiction are at least partly CGI shots, it’s almost never any good, least of all when elements like fire and rain are deployed in all their blurry mediocrity.
Director Renny Harlin did the Die Hard trilogy and hasn’t made a proper film since at least the mid-1990s. The Legend of Hercules continues that bad streak, and it may just be one of the worst films of the year, despite a half-hearted attempt to compare Hercules, the son of Zeus, to Jesus, the son of the Christian God.
The story of Hercules — whose father is the ruler of the gods, and whose mother is a mere mortal, Alcmene, wife of the brutal King Amphitryon — ought to be much more stirring. Amphitryon rules over a vast kingdom, but his wife feels neglected, and when she is told one night that Zeus wants her child, she goes to bed, makes some groaning noises while the sheets billow in an angelic light, and suddenly she has fallen pregnant. A comparison to the conception of Mary should be fairly obvious here, except that there is no suggestion that Alcmene was a virgin.
To read the full review, visit The Prague Post. The Legend of Hercules is currently on wide release in Bulgaria.
(Still of Kellan Lutz in The Legend of Hercules. © 2013 – Summit Entertainment)
