Hercules (UK Rating: 12A)
The first few minutes of a film can be crucial. Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) was a notorious flop simply because the audience couldn't hear the opening dialogue. Not that Brett Ratner's Hercules is in the same league, nor is there any doubt about what the characters are saying early on - and that turns out to be something of a curse.The film starts by filling in Hercules' back-story, aka his twelve labours. His nephew Iolaus (Reece Ritchie) is the narrator, and his reason for relating his uncle's heroics is that he's in a life-and-death situation with some pirates. The likelihood of Hercules turning up to save his bacon should scare them witless, he thinks. The verdict on his story? "What a load of cr*p!" It reverberates around the film for the next ninety minutes.
With his labours behind him, Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) has become a mercenary. He and his four trusted followers sell their services to the highest bidder, do the job, get paid and then walk away. This time they're hired by the King of Thrace (John Hurt) whose kingdom is threatened with destruction by a deadly enemy. He needs an army and it's down to Hercules and his merry men - and woman - to create a fighting force out of the country's male population. There's a sub-plot involving the death of Hercules' wife and daughter and the King responsible, Eurystheus (Joseph Fiennes), but it isn't worth worrying about.
Could this simply be the result of effective CGI? Hardly, because the special effects in Hercules are nothing to write home about. Compared to more recent offerings like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and the lower budget T S Spivet, they are, at times, risible. The mountain in Thrace looks like it's been painted on canvas on the studio back lot and the baby Hercules at the very start of the film is obviously computer generated.
There's action a-plenty - battles, mainly - and they're done adequately, but it's the scenes in between where the film really comes unstuck. They're meant to move the plot forward and give the audience some insight into the characters. In fact, they take the story along at a snail's pace, the characters just stagnate and the dialogue is leaden to the point of embarrassment. Thankfully, experienced thesps like John Hurt and Ian McShane know exactly how to handle that: they simply ham it up to the max, providing some of the film's light relief. Indeed, what laughs there are come mainly from McShane as the mercenary/soothsayer who is constantly trying to predict his own death.