The priestess’ gaze is steely, imperious; the fate of worlds hangs in the balance. “Would you bear the son of Zeus?” she asks. The queen thinks about it, as if she’s being asked to take on some afternoon work tutoring helots. “For the sake of peace – I would!” she replies. So Zeus “blasts his seed” into her, little baby Hercules is born – and the Legend Begins, though in fact the film is better known as The Legend of Hercules and it actually says The Legend of Hercules on the print I watched, so I don’t know why our cinemas are going with an alternate title.
Confusion over titles is a sure sign of a B-movie (think of those spaghetti Westerns with half a dozen alternate titles), as if trial and error might lead to a moniker that’ll distract punters from the film’s obvious awfulness. Hercules is obviously awful, though in fact I giggled a lot at its infelicities, from a tutor with the thickest Slavic accent south of Zagreb to the veritable blizzard of petals or dust mites or whatever in every single love scene (I also liked the reference to “the canines of Olympus”; no mere ‘dogs’ for our classical Greek friends!). Then there’s the bit where a good honest yeoman, oppressed by the evil king, approaches his beefy saviour with love in his eyes: “Is it true? You are Hercules, the god?”. A long pause, then the most complete and inarguable riposte: “No. I’m just a man”.
Oddly enough, he is just a man. It’s true that at one point – almost in passing – he fights, and kills, the Nemean Lion, just like the Hercules of mythology, but even that lion is merely ‘a’ Nemean lion (there’s a lot of them about) and its death is irrelevant to the plot, except in fuelling the love triangle that occupies much of the first half. Mostly, this Herc (played by the bland Kellan Lutz from Twilight) is a bruiser rather than a demigod, prone to fist-fights more than Herculean labours. He can take an arrow in the shoulder, and seems impervious to punches, but otherwise has no special powers – at least till the climax, when he declares fealty to his true father, Zeus (“I believe in you!”), and instantly receives super-strength in the form of a glowing blue light.
This is totally unfair, because Herc (unlike Perseus in the recent Clash of the Titans) was never especially anti-Zeus. If he’s got daddy issues they have to do with his mortal father, King Amphitryon (up-and-coming action man Scott Adkins), who’s always putting him down: “He will never be an equal to his older brother,” scoffs this bad dad when Herc is still a baby. Our hero doesn’t even learn about the Zeus connection till the film’s almost over – so how was he supposed to ‘believe’ in Zeus and become a demigod? What if the king’s men had killed him when he was just a beefy strongman? How would the prophecy be fulfilled then? You’d think an Olympian deity would have a bit more sense.
Where in the B-movie spectrum could one place this amiable rubbish? There are no monsters, hardly any fantasy elements. The references to Ben Hur (galley slaves) and Spartacus (gladiators) are pure sword-and-sandal, but the bare-knuckle fights seem designed for wrestling fans (another Hercules with a former wrestler, Dwayne Johnson, is coming to cinemas this summer). In the end, though the film isn’t cheap – its budget is estimated at an obscene $70 million – and features some impressive CGI (especially the opening shot), it’s perhaps most reminiscent of an old B-Western. There’s a bit where Hercules and Co come back to camp to find their comrades riddled with arrows that got me thinking ‘Injuns!’, and of course there’s the old-fashioned love story with Herc and his brother as romantic rivals for soppy Hebe (Gaia Weiss). Has he “taken the girl’s maidenhood”? A demigod never tells.
60 years ago, in other words, Hercules: The Legend Begins would be called something like ‘North of El Paso’, would be made for one-hundredth of the budget and would be the tale of a cowboy fighting a nasty rancher over the love of a damsel. The love scenes would be equally chaste, and we might still have a scene where Herc fights “Half-Face and Humbaba” in the arena (!) – but we wouldn’t have the hilarious bullet-time effects (battle scenes getting slowed down and freeze-framed at regular intervals) and of course we wouldn’t have Zeus blasting his seed into Herc’s mum, though that too is chaste. Lights flash, sheets billow, the queen looks troubled and the king rushes in, slashing at the bedposts with his sword. Are these the birth pangs of Hercules, the god? No. He’s just a man.
