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Critics Consensus: Cheap-looking, poorly acted, and dull, The Legend of Hercules is neither fun enough to qualify as an action movie nor absorbing enough to work on a dramatic level.
Critic Consensus: Cheap-looking, poorly acted, and dull, The Legend of Hercules is neither fun enough to qualify as an action movie nor absorbing enough to work on a dramatic level.
All Critics (79) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (2) | Rotten (77)
Essentially a Monday Night Raw episode with mythological dressing.
The dialogue isn't dubbed, but is written and delivered so indifferently that it might as well have been.
[Other "Hercules" movies] at least nodded at classical mythology. Harlin's boasts a Hercules in name chiefly and banks on moviegoers' ignorance.
It delivers what it promises, which is muscular guys in skimpy clothes fighting and howling, as well as some large-scale digitally enhanced battle sequences.
The Legend of Hercules may not track, but Harlin still knows how to set up a rousing circus.
The whole thing is a total bore.
Greek mythology's famous strongman ironically fails to bust out of director Renny Harlin's weak-kneed and corroded costume drama...If anything, this particular Hercules stronghold barely musters up the interest to flash a bite-size bicep.
Visually dull and flat out ugly, Hercules apes the stylization of Zack Snyder's 300 to a troubling degree. It looks and feels cheap from start to finish, with nary a color to be seen.
Most major films are at least technically competent if nothing else, but The Legend of Hercules looks worse than most movies you'd find on the SyFy channel.
The film is terrible, and should be avoided.
While some of the effects are alright, the Nemean lion that Hercules battles in one scene looks comical. Hercules, looking like a beefcake at a toga party, starts using his superpowers only towards the end of the film. Too little, too late.
This film should be removed from theaters as soon as possible to avoid damaging the brains of people who have the misfortune of seeing it.
It's as if director Renny Harlin watched Gladiator and said, "Yeah, I can do that, but much worse." The plot is almost exactly a ripoff of the 2000-Best Picture winner, having the godly Hercules besmirched and thrown into the arena, where he must build a name for himself in gladiatorial combat and work the support of the crowd in order to gain his vengeance against a jealous tyrant with daddy issues. If that wasn't enough, the visual aesthetic is very much a CGI-heavy melange of 300, with the super stylized slow-mo action standing in the way for plot. A sword-and-sandals epic should not be on the verge of putting you to sleep, but Hercules goes there. Kellan Lutz (Twilight) might have the right build to fill out the character but he's too limited as an actor to do much beyond the fight choreography. The only reason to see this movie is if you're trapped on an airplane and it happens to be on. Who would have thought that the flawed Brett Ratner-directed Hercules movie would look even better? Nate's Grade: D
Super Reviewer
The story of Hercules has graced us many times in numerous incarnations. Renny Harlin's latest turkey, The Legend of Hercules, is the myth told in the most lifeless and uninteresting way possible. Sets look cheap. Costumes look put together from discount surplus attire. Actors don't act; they yell; all the time; every line - it's like high school kids performing bad Shakespeare without microphones. Granted, their performances are clearly the fault of the director. Everything in this movie is a cliché, from the opening "prophecy" to the final siege in the middle of a thunderstorm set to booming Hans Zimmer-esque music. I don't understand why anyone bothered trying to make this movie and I can't fathom anyone being remotely interested in seeing it.
Uninspired, wholly unoriginal, and it strays so far from the source material of Hercules that is may just be called "300: Hercules the New Recruit," because right down to it's core, this film is a rip-off of "300" in every way imaginable, right down to it's slow motion nonsense in the middle of every single action sequence. Kelllan Lutz is laughable at times as the title character and the supporting cast do not seem to know what film they are in. This has some of the worst CGI I've seen in years, as far as the standard Hollywood blockbusters go nowadays, the script is sloppily written, and it is not directed very well either, which is a shame due to who was at the helm. Renny Harlin is not the only one responsible here, but he should have chosen a different film to work on. "The Legend of Hercules" is everything you would expect it to be and less. If you can accept how bad the effects are, you can have some fun with the action and dumb dialogue, but that's about it. This is a truly bad film.
Apparently acting lessons were not among the Labors of Hercules. The true Herculean labor associated with this film seems to be the cleaning of the stables -- what dreck. CGI effects were glamorous and stunning at times; woefully inept at other times. The story was random and seemed sophomoricly episodic. The plot was unnecessarily stupid -- for example, killing the Nemean Lion in a distant place and then showing up with it skinned, tanned and cleaned in the next scene with the unnecessary and illogical comment that Hercules had been gone for a mere two hours. What?! This is a sad attempt to make a film far beyond the filmmakers' skill. Nevertheless. if you ignore the considerable amount of illogical and stupid permeating the film, it is fun -- and has a lot of great beef cake to drool over.
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