The Legend of Hercules Review

Prior to watching this film I had a very low set of expectations from this Hercules movie. It seemed like who ever decided to create The Legend of Hercules decided to capitalize on the really big film featuring the rock in a similar project. In addition to that the film seemed to be lacking its own individuality, if you paid attention to the film and didn’t give up on it you could find some similar elements to the Gladiator, the 300 and Spartacus TV series. A movie is allowed to have similarities to other films but in this case The Legend of Hercules was singularly constructed from parts other films described above. Each part was taken from a different movie without being glued in the end. It seemed like one big mess of copycat scenes which purpose was to be the copy and not differentiate it from the others, bringing nothing new to the table.

Like you figured out already, this film could be a lot better. The screenplay, story, dialogs were pretty bad; the excessive slow motions scenes were not needed. It only caught Lutz in different mid air scenarios making silly faces. It all seemed to be there as if they were forced and their purpose was to give the audience a break from the action. With all the bad things about the film the action sequences, photography and the visual scenery looked pretty good. Unfortunately that is not enough for The Legend of Hercules to become a watchable movie. The plot and the story are crucial in every film; The Legend of Hercules just didn’t have that. When you watch a film and think to yourself "that just doesn’t make any sense" or you see through a lot of events in the film that force another situation just to bring the hero to his current position. It just doesn’t look good and the film becomes from being simply bad to one big joke. if we are talking about bad jokes, I could have let go a lot of bad dialogs, plot holes and all of the mistakes that been made by the director, writers and the entire production but the scene with the lightning towards the end, the one where Hercules cleans house from King Amphitryon. This couldn’t be ignored, until that point in the film The Legend of Hercules seemed to be a regular Greek stile film without any special events, and then out of a sudden you make this Zeus lightning sword that cleans house. Just when our heroes find themselves in a pickle? This was just bad, who ever came up with that idea should not work in this industry any more. Don’t get me wrong if we would have seen Greek gods who use their powers, or someone use his special/unnatural skills from the get go I think that I would be ok with the lightning clean house scene. But we didn’t have that during the film, it seemed that towards the end of the movie Hercules pulled that thing out of his ass.


The final fight scene between Hercules and King Amphitryon looked like one of the better things about the film. King Amphitryon practically wiped the floor with Hercules. But towards the end out of the nowhere Hercules pulls one move to get the best out of King Amphitryon and stubs him with his mother’s dagger?!?! Even if I tried, i wouldn’t be able to come up with a lamer finale to this mighty battle. 


Unfortunately there are professionals that think about things like that and then we get this sort of a finale. I don’t understand who choreographed the last fighting scene but it would be a lot logical to make the fight balanced. And if not, on one side you got your hero who is half god. On the other you got a crazy but really great killer king. You would think that the semi god will have an advantage here. I guess you are wrong because that’s not what we saw.

The acting of most participants was surprisingly decent. I haven’t seen Kellan Lutz a lot but the guy seems like having a potential. Unfortunately the casting of the important character was not great. The Iphicles character looked bad, so was King Amphitryon. Scott Adkins is great at what he generally does (Martial Arts) but in The Legend of Hercules he was horribly misused and wasn’t given the right platform to showcase his abilities. The two scenes in the beginning and the end of the film gave us a small glimpse to what Adkins is really capable off (and that was without using his legs). Most of the film Adkins shouted and acted like a raging lunatic without any logical reason.


This movie cannot be recommended unless you are a diehard Scott Adkins fan and even than its hard to recommend the film because Adkins is barely there.So the choice is yours, take it or leave it.



The Legend of Hercules DVD

Legend of Hercules [Blu-ray]




About Sasha Shapiro

Sasha is the founder and editor of Cool Reviews Rule. He is very passionate about Movies, TV Shows and some Books. His favorite genres are: Action, Fantasy, History, Horror, Sci-fi and Adventure.
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2 comments:

  1. Hercules certainly doesn't live up to being a demi-god, in this film. I agree with your review.

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