Review of The Legend of Hercules (2014) by Harry W — 23 Jul 2014

Although I was a fan of Renny Harlin, the main reason I wanted to see The Legend of Hercules was because it was an example of a film with a massive budget which was seriously critically panned and I just needed to know how it went so wrong.

It is clear that The Legend of Hercules is attempting to cash in on the success of 300 and more specifically its recent sequel 300: Rise of an Empire because it follows essentially the same style. But its success is a lot lesser because the excess of visual effects in the film and the lacklustre locations that the film is shot on fail to give it any kind of legitimacy. It just makes it all look cheap, and it is too eay to believe that the film takes place in the modern day because its cinematography is conventional and its definition is high quality which means it is really easy to pick up on the cheap aspects of the setting. Essentially, The Legend of Hercules is a very unconvincing and cheap looking film which spent the majority of its $70 million budget on lacklustre visual effects while the scenery and costumes seem to be recycled from the recent film Immortals. The.

I don't understand how Renny Harlin, an accomplished film director who has created films with fun visual effects such as Deep Blue See could not realise just how lacklustre the visuals are in The Legend of Hercules. It is so clear that the actors are interacting with greenscreens the entire time because as well as the fact that they are so disconnected from the entire world around them. The Legend of Hercules could have been a good guilty pleasure if the visual effects were toned up more. I mean, they establish some decent action scenes at times, but all in all they just were not impressive. Renny Harlin could have used the visual effects in moderation in The Legend of Hercules at the right moments and focused more on live action scenes, but his excessive dedication to them and lack of focus on establishing strong physical elements that exist beyond a computer studio end up being the central problem in The Legend of Hercules. To a certain extent, I was able to look beyond that. But not to a point where I would consider The Legend of Hercules a good film.

The only thing I hoped that would be any good in The Legend of Hercules was the action. Although the action scenes were choreographed well and managed to use a touch of visual effects to a decent extent at times ,the issue is that they seem too artificial. By that I mean they are largely unrealistic in nature even when they are simple close contact battle scenes, and the characters do not go through a touch of blood or gore in the process. The fact is that the action scenes have a certain extent of entertainment to them and frankly they were better than I had expected, but the cheap visual effects has a habit of showing a bit too often. I guess I didn't mind too much because in a world tainted with terrible action films, The Legend of Hercules still stands out as a better film than A Good Day to Die Hard, Taken 2 and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. It is a poorly made film, but it is certainly underrated and does not deserve the kind of flack that it received. The simple fact is that it is not a story of Hercules, it is an excuse to dress up Twilight actor Kellan Lutz in revealing clothing and have him show off his abs as he fights off other poor actors and terribly rendered CGI lions. If you can look past that as well as the total lack of sense in the storytelling then perhaps you may enjoy the film. Its best qualities are that it has some decent action scenes, although there is a feeling that there could have been more of them and that they did not rush by so past. If you go into the film with really low expectations like I did, you will not be surprised at scenes depicting Kellan Lutz randomly diving backwards into a waterfall and rescuing his girlfriend from drowning in a river. It is clearly marketed at the teenage audiences, and it is believable that many are dumb enough to fall under the spell of the film while they're busy swooning for the former Twilight star to fight off his opressors. The point is, there is definitely a certain level of dumb fun in the film, and the amount that the audience is actually able to locate will explain precisely how much they end up enjoying The Legend of Hercules. But the most picky of people will look at it and say that it is crap, because in actual fact it is.

The script of the film is terrible, and the acting is no better. But considering that the only cast members are underwear models, former Twilight actor Kellan Lutz, Jean-Claude Van Damme's right hand man Scott Adkins and essentially nobody else you would have ever heard of, that's practically the expectation. There are really no characters in The Legend of Hercules and the film is not in the slightest about Hercules, it is a mockbuster of 300 with a higher budget and yet lesser quality visual effects. It delivers some decent action scenes which are entertaining while the rest of the qualities in the film ranging from storytelling to the script and to the acting are so poor that they are laughable, as is the general visual style of the film. You cannot have expectations for a film like this to be good, even if you are a fan of Renny Harlin because it simply cannot be when it is a front for Kellan Lutz to parade around shirtless. But he makes a decent action hero and has me thinking he might be good in The Expendables 3, so at least it left me optimistic.

So The Legend of Hercules is crap because it is poorly acted, thinly scripted, cannot tell a story and looks surprisingly cheap regardless of its high budget and could not really have any less to do with Hercules himself. But if you go in with the expectations of it to have quality of a film by The Asylum and hoping for some slightly decent action scenes, you may not find yourself to be too disappointed.