The priestess\u2019 gaze is steely, imperious; the fate of worlds hangs in the balance. \u201cWould you bear the son of Zeus?\u201d she asks. The queen thinks about it, as if she\u2019s being asked to take on some afternoon work tutoring helots. \u201cFor the sake of peace \u2013 I would!\u201d she replies. So Zeus \u201cblasts his seed\u201d into her, little baby Hercules is born \u2013 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\u2019t know why our cinemas are going with an alternate title.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll distract punters from the film\u2019s 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 \u201cthe canines of Olympus\u201d; no mere \u2018dogs\u2019 for our classical Greek friends!). Then there\u2019s the bit where a good honest yeoman, oppressed by the evil king, approaches his beefy saviour with love in his eyes: \u201cIs it true? You are Hercules, the god?\u201d. A long pause, then the most complete and inarguable riposte: \u201cNo. I\u2019m just a man\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oddly enough, he is just a man. It\u2019s true that at one point \u2013 almost in passing \u2013 he fights, and kills, the Nemean Lion, just like the Hercules of mythology, but even that lion is merely \u2018a\u2019 Nemean lion (there\u2019s 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 \u2013 at least till the climax, when he declares fealty to his true father, Zeus (\u201cI believe in you!\u201d), and instantly receives super-strength in the form of a glowing blue light.<\/p>\n
This is totally unfair, because Herc (unlike Perseus in the recent Clash of the Titans) was never especially anti-Zeus. If he\u2019s got daddy issues they have to do with his mortal father, King Amphitryon (up-and-coming action man Scott Adkins), who\u2019s always putting him down: \u201cHe will never be an equal to his older brother,\u201d scoffs this bad dad when Herc is still a baby. Our hero doesn\u2019t even learn about the Zeus connection till the film\u2019s almost over \u2013 so how was he supposed to \u2018believe\u2019 in Zeus and become a demigod? What if the king\u2019s men had killed him when he was just a beefy strongman? How would the prophecy be fulfilled then? You\u2019d think an Olympian deity would have a bit more sense.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t cheap \u2013 its budget is estimated at an obscene $70 million \u2013 and features some impressive CGI (especially the opening shot), it\u2019s perhaps most reminiscent of an old B-Western. There\u2019s a bit where Hercules and Co come back to camp to find their comrades riddled with arrows that got me thinking \u2018Injuns!\u2019, and of course there\u2019s the old-fashioned love story with Herc and his brother as romantic rivals for soppy Hebe (Gaia Weiss). Has he \u201ctaken the girl\u2019s maidenhood\u201d? A demigod never tells.<\/p>\n
60 years ago, in other words, Hercules: The Legend Begins would be called something like \u2018North of El Paso\u2019, 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 \u201cHalf-Face and Humbaba\u201d in the arena (!) \u2013 but we wouldn\u2019t have the hilarious bullet-time effects (battle scenes getting slowed down and freeze-framed at regular intervals) and of course we wouldn\u2019t have Zeus blasting his seed into Herc\u2019s 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\u2019s just a man.