The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Legend of Hercules.

This movie is giving me astonishingly little to work with. It's not like Hilary's America where there's bullshit flying at you every second and you can't help but try and rebut as much of it as you can. Sadly, the problems are astonishingly simple. The first scene, I was tempted to check and see if I didn't somehow put 300 in there by mistake, the plagiarism is that obvious. Then I saw the caption saying it was in Argos in 1200 BC. Naturally, that kind of sealed the deal. That and 300 is at least interesting. It's dumb as all fuck, but at least it looked interesting. Things are not helped by the fact that the CGI looks like utter dogshit:



I would remind you that this had a budget of $70 million.

The performances are, to a one, like a shitty theatre troupe trying to put on a Greek tragedy and failing miserably. The plot, and romance are bog-standard and have bugger-all to do with the actual legend of Hercules. Seriously, if you're going to make a movie about Hercules, at least open a fucking book about Greek Mythology at some point. I know Edith Hamilton has a pretty good book on it, and Hercules gets his own chapter. Well, I may be a bit unfair on the filmmakers, because one of Hercules' opponents is named Humbaba. A giant defeated by Gilgamesh. From fucking Mesopotamian mythology.



You start with Greek mythology, and, instead of literally anything but the Nemean Lion, you land on the legends of Mesopotamia? You know what, The Apparition having more plot in its trailer than the actual film, and the moral of The Emoji Movie fucking up so horribly actually make sense if you assume the people in charge had no idea what they were doing, whether it was the former trying to fix it after poor focus groups, or the latter trying to get it done quickly. Even Dinesh D'Souza being stupid enough to not look for loopholes in campaign finance law (that are stupefyingly easy to exploit) makes some sense. How does one go from Greco-Roman Mythology and decide to insert something from the significantly more obscure Tale of Gilgamesh without bothering to pay much lip service to the original myths?

And instead of having "the paws of a lion and a body covered in thorny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull; his tail and phallus each ended in a snake's head," he's just a big guy with Coolio hair. Also, did I mention Hercules is a fucking Gladiator? You know, the bloodsport native to Ancient Rome and not Greece?

Honestly, I think we've got a new candidate for "most generic piece of shit" in the Deep Hurting Project.