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Review: The Legend of Hercules

By Christine Petralia

Image courtesy of Summit Entertainment

January 11, 2014
 
I hate a lot of films that come out between January and April. Sure, you have all of the movies up for awards that will be out for a while, but I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about films like The Legend of Hercules. This film had the potential to not only be awesome, but potentially launch the career of Kellan Lutz, of the Twilight films. However, it was awesomely bad and just might set Lutz’s career back a bit.
 
The story is quite simple and slightly different than Greek mythology. After taking over cities just because he can, Queen Alcmene (Roxanne McKee) gets disgusted with King Amphityron (Scott Adkins) and prays to the god Hera, wife of Zesus. One day Hera answers her prayers – the solution – Zesus impregnates the queen and their son will save everyone. The son’s name is to be Hercules.
 
Twenty years later, Hercules is buff and handsome, nothing like his jealous step-brother, Iphicles (Liam Garrigan). Hercules is in love with a princes from another city, Hebe (Gaia Weiss), but already hating Hercules, the king promises Iphicles will marry Hebe and brokers a deal with her father. He then banishes Hercules into battle and pays to have him killed. Just before he leaves, the queen tells Hercules who he really is, but he doesn’t believe her. However, when he is one of two left standing after battling an army, Hercules slightly starts to believe. After the battle, his family and Hebe believe he is dead, but he is actually sold into slavery with his new friend, Sotiris (Liam McIntyre – yes, Spartacus). Together they fight their way through the underground pits and convince their ‘master’ to let them fight in Greece.
 
Once he gains his freedom and after he learns of his mother’s death, Hercules starts to take back his city and essentially wages war on his step-father, the king. And just when he’s about to lose, he summons his real father, Zesus, for the strength to win.
 
Even though it was pretty straight-forward, the plot had a lot of holes and left me with some questions. For one, I wasn’t sure if it followed true Greek mythology, which I found out later it doesn’t. Two, there were a few scenes with just didn’t really make sense to leave in.
 
I wasn’t really expecting too much from Hercules, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad. I figured it would be similar to the series Spartacus, and when I saw that the actual actor who plays Spartacus was in it, I had hope. But alas, it was more of a B film or something that should air on the SyFy channel. Lutz and McIntyre are pretty decent actors, but even their skills couldn’t save the film. And the CG just gets worse throughout the film. While the beginning looks pretty cool with the big battle, you could tell that they just didn’t put too much money into the post-production of the film.

 

We saw it in 2D, however, I’m pretty sure our theater showed the 3D version without the glasses, as most of the film was blurry. If this was a better movie, I’d tell you to spend the extra cash for the 3D version, because the quality would have been better and some of the scenes were made for 3D. But it’s not. And I would have liked to say this film had everything you wanted for men and women. For the guys, it had good battle scenes. For the women, it had eye candy and romance. BUT, it’s not worth it. Don’t waste your money on this one. Only four more months until the good action films come out again – sigh.

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All works created by Christine McGrath; Centereach, New York  All Rights Reserved 2024

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