When a legendary tale is so well chronicled that it doesn’t bear another tolerable iteration, what does a narrator of stories do — other than pack up his tent and slip away quietly into the night?
Well, he could always airily dismiss those well-known legends as just so much myth-making and spin a completely different yarn. It’s a formula that works just right for Hercules and for director Brett Ratner.
In this modern-day revisionist retelling of the Greco-Roman legend, Hercules has been forced, by a twist of dark circumstances that haunt him throughout (and which are revealed to us in the end), to become a hoodlum-for-hire, his bulging biceps available to anyone able and willing to fork out plentiful gold coins.
To pimp his mercenary business, Hercules (played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who reveals a human heart, and even a streak of humour, beneath all that brawn) has his nephew sing paeans about him, metaphorically steroid-boosting his muscles with ‘mythologies’ about his demi-god status and his many biff-bang exploits.
We see glimpses of Hercules’ famed ‘Twelve Labours’: Hercules slaying the Lernaean Hydra, ripping apart the jaws of the Nemean Lion, pole-axing the Erymanthian Boar, all of which reinforce the belief that 3D film-making was invented for movies like this!
But thrilling as they are, they form a mere backdrop for more epic battles to come, when Hercules is enlisted by Lord Cotys of Thrace (John Hurt, who essays a nuanced performance) to defend the Thracian Kingdom from marauders and sorcerers. The latter appear to have an army of centaurs on their side but they, somewhat disappointingly, never come out to do battle, robbing the film of what could have been a cinematic first.
Hercules has been promised his weight in gold, and for that kind of compensation, he comes across as someone who wouldn’t worry about honour, but in this case he also reckons he is waging war for a good cause. (Cue: a twist in the tale.)
There’s just a faint hint of a romantic interest between Hercules and Lord Cotys’ daughter Ergenia (Rebecca Ferguson) but that strand gets drowned out in the rush of adrenaline and testosterone that the film otherwise engenders.
Once the mercenary mission has been accomplished, and the compensation has been received, Hercules and his band of merry warriors have the option to fade away, but destiny beckons Hercules, who has to live up to the myths he has manufactured about himself, and fight one last epic battle to redeem himself and exorcise the demons of his mind.
It's all enormously entertaining, and Johnson makes for an authentic Hercules. Given his frame, that's no surprise. What does surprise though is the human dimension he brings to bear with his tragic back-story and his—ahem!—soulful eyes.
But above else, it's the lightness of narrative tone that Ratner brings to bear that sets this film apart from other grim-faced renditions of Grecian tales. It's a lesson that even grand epics lend themselves to alternative narrative formats in the hands of a deft director.
