Audio By Carbonatix
January! Just the time to snuggle up with a 3D swordandpectoral extravaganza. And although some of its more imaginative plot details
would make Edith Hamilton blanch, Renny Harlin’s Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise that it makes in the first place:
There are lots of battles (albeit rather jerkily rendered ones), some grandlooking horses decked out in handsome metal headdresses, and lots of
welloiled beefcake.
You could ask for more — an actual script, maybe? — but Harlin covers most of the basics. Or, perhaps more accurately, he
leaves them uncovered.
Brawny Hercules (Kellan Lutz, Emmett Cullen of the Twilight Saga), son of the comely Queen Alcmene (Roxanne McKee), is sent off
to battle by the resentful man who is not his real father, King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins).
Because the god Zeus, as we know, is Hercules’s real daddy, which is even better than having Frank Sinatra’s DNA in your gene pool.
There’s also a jealous halfbrother, Iphicles (Liam Garrigan), and a radiant, willowy love interest, Hebe (Gaia Weiss).
Every actor muddles along valiantly with the movie’s stiff dialogue, and most of them — especially Australian Liam McIntyre, who
plays Hercules’s buddy Sotiris with an almost Shakespearean nobility — get by. In fact, of all of them, Lutz has the smallest measure of
screen presence: He looks like a frat boy headed to a postgraduation job at Brown Brothers Harriman, and his voice is less a mighty roar than a
throaty croak. In the pectoral department, however, he does not disappoint. And if that’s not at least part of what brings you to The Legend of
Hercules, well, you’re at the wrong movie.
