Anyone who has seen The Dark Knight will notice the unfortunate tone in action movies to go ‘dark and serious’. Unfortunately, most people do not go to see action movies to get depressed. To be honest, they go to see action movies to get an adrenaline rush. The best action movies, such as Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and most Arnold Schwarzenegger movies recognize this. Others, however, such as Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Dark Knight, Sin City, and the 2005 TV miniseries Hercules do not.
Yes, the old Ray Harryhausen films, like Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, were campy, loaded with hammy acting, and dated SFX…but they were good adventure films, and the hammy acting was often quite humorous. Moreover, the stop-motion SFX, while not on a par with modern CGI, have their charm. Harryhausen was the greatest SFX person in history, not because his effects looked realistic, but because he elicited good ‘performances’ out of his ‘actors’. Creatures such as Talos in Jason and the Argonauts and the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad have a far wider range of emotions than anything CGI has ever constructed, such as Shrek.
Yet, the CGI effects in Hercules are every bit as corny as anything Harryhausen ever constructed, and they lack the emotional range of his creatures. Although I am no fan of those films, there is simply no comparison between the effects in Hercules and the lauded effects in The Lord of the Rings films of a few years back. In fact, all the actors, digital and real, are bad. The person who plays Hercules is like a British Tom Cruise, in that he has the range of a cucumber. Alcmene is a total one-note psycho-bitch, and Meg seems to be sleepwalking through her performance.
In fact, the only major actor in the film is Sean Astin, who played Sam in The Lord of the Rings films, playing Linus, a songwriter who accompanies Hercules on his missions to provide a record of his great accomplishments. The only other semi-notable actors are Timothy Dalton, who most regard as the worst filmic representation of James Bond, and Leelee Sobieski, who is most notable for her 5-minute role as a modern-day Lolita in Stanley Kubrick’s masterful psychodrama Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise. Astin probably does the best acting job in the film, although that is not saying much. As Amphitryon, Dalton shows no improvement in the nearly 20-year gap between his duo of terrible, wooden performances as 007 and this, and as Deianira, Sobieski shows why her career never went anywhere after Eyes Wide Shut in the kind of role that serves as a platform for actors to go on to bigger, better roles.
Yes, the cheesy acting in the Ray Harryhausen films is much preferable to this. It is hardly great, but at least some of the actors knew how to perfect the art of scenery chewing, à la Jack Nicholson in Batman. There is no such luck here, which brings me to the greatest flaw in Hercules, how unremittingly bleak and dull it is.
Simply put, the film attempts to be ‘dark and realistic’ in a genre that is inherently unrealistic. This is Hercules, not Othello! I wanted a ripping good yarn, something equivalent to the Spider-Man films of a few years back, where the story is intriguing and the characters are people we know and meet every day. Yet we do not get that. Instead, we get wan attempts at character development and intellectual depth, in a supposed critique of religious fanaticism. Fine, we get it, religious extremism leads to nothing but bloodshed, but anyone old enough to remember the September 11 attacks knows that! There is no attempt to probe this fanaticism or understand it. Instead, we merely get a condemnation. In addition, the characters are so one-dimensional and dull that the 2/3 of the film wasted at trying to develop them simply makes the audience want to sleep.
Now, as if that is not bad enough, the few action scenes in the film are dull and disappointing. Look at the action scenes in Terminator 2 or Aliens. There, the action is so intense, and we so did not expect what was coming that the audience cannot turn away from the screen, and the thrill intoxicating. Those films actually transport us into the action. In Hercules, the action is so rote that the audience simply does not care, and we usually know exactly what is coming…in fact, the characters usually tell us exactly what’s coming! In the Hydra scene, I knew that Amphitryon was gonna die, and I knew that the beautiful woman was the Nemean lion, and I knew during Hercules’ ‘climactic showdown’ with Antaeus that there was going to be a ‘stunning revelation’, à la Darth Vader.
This brings me to the ultimate flaw with the film. Simply put, dark and grim does not work when imposed on a genre that deals with things essentially fantastic and whimsical in nature. If there had been well-developed characters if we actually cared about them and their plights, and if they were actually compelling and realistic, then some of these flaws may have been forgivable. The problem is that they are not, and it is easier to create a string of good action scenes and a rollicking adventure than it is to do Shakespearean drama. Why do you think that everyone remembers The Terminator but only remember Terms of Endearment as a synonym for tearjerker? That is easy, because The Terminator is a great action film while Terms of Endearment is one of the most shameless tearjerkers out there. Simply put, Hercules’ angst and plight does not compare to that of Othello, Hamlet, nor Macbeth, and while it makes for a ripping good yarn, when played as serious drama, it is ridiculous.
Despite many pretensions by scholars and academics, Greek myths are not Shakespeare. They do not tell us anything deep about ourselves, nor do they explore relevant issues…and may Joseph Campbell and the rest of his ilk rot! The fact is that Greek myths, such as the tales of Hercules, the Argonauts, and Theseus are ancient Greece’s equivalent to comic books. Compare Hercules to Superman or Theseus to Batman, and the similarities are manifest. Instead of learning from the master’s mistakes, and correcting them, it appears that comic books decided to recreate the mistakes of their masters, and this all culminates in last year’s egregiously dull and vastly overrated The Dark Knight, replete with terrible performance from the late Heath Ledger.
Simply put, until people learn how to develop characters, create interesting stories, and deeply explore intellectual issues through such media, they should stop trying to do it. They do not know what they are doing, and they are clearly way out of their league. Even Frank Miller, inventor of the black-and-white comic book (I refuse to use the term ‘graphic novel’ because only geeks use it), only did such to impress girls. Yet his work was so dead serious that it had its own inevitable camp value. Imagine having Hercules standing at the edge of a cliff giving a soliloquy in Elizabethan English. Now imagine the laughter that would invoke. That is what Miller did. Like The Dark Knight, Hercules does not go far enough in that direction.
No, instead, it is just a bad action film, with pretensions to depth and seriousness, and whereas a noted hack like Michael Bay can claim that his schlock does not pretend to be anything else, Hercules can make no such claim. Game, set…oh, well, you know what is coming.
