<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Renny Harlin. Starring Kellan Lutz, Liam McIntyre, Scott Adkins, Liam Garrigan, Roxanne McKee, Gaia Weiss, Rade Serbedzija

Here’s a movie that’s worse than this year’s worst movie, 47 Ronin, so far. Move over Keanu Reeves, Kellan Lutz is officially the dullest actor on the planet!

He may be hot and he may have earned tonnes of money playing Emmett Cullen in the Twilight movies (which were god awful but far more entertaining than this film) but Kellan Lutz isn’t going anywhere legendary after acting in The Legend of Hercules. By far the worst Hercules movie ever. Not that the other ones were great. In fact only Kevin Sorbo’s TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys can be called a success and even that was overshadowed by the more fun Xena: Warrior Princess.

K-Lutz was all right in the Immortals but then he didn’t have much to do. Here, he looks beefy with pecs so perky they put his lovely co-star and love interest’s (Gaia Weiss) assets to shame. But his face looks ridiculously tanned and his dialogue delivery is so very dull. He’s boring. And so is this predictable film.

Shot in Bulgaria with a cast of mostly unknown actors, The Legend of Hercules is an origin story that may or may not be entirely true to Greek mythology.

Hercules is born to father King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins) and mother Queen Alcmene (Roxanne McKee) who doesn’t quite like her husband and so asks God of God’s Zeus to sire a half man, half god with her. The King suspects something’s amiss and therefore favours his older cowardly son Iphicles (Liam Garrigan). Hercules falls for Princess Hebe (Gaia Weiss) but alas, she is betrothed to Iphicles. So King sends Herc into a trap and… well you can guess where that all goes.

All the male actors in this film seem to be hamming it. Scott Adkins with his horrendous accent is laughable in the role. He only has his muscles – far better than Kellan Lutz’s I must say – going for him. Hercules’s friend Captain Sotiris (Liam McIntyre) tries to act but his accent leads him to mumble his lines so you can’t really understand a word he’s saying. Roxanne McKee as the Queen is relatively coherent and barely watchable as she tries to bring some gravity to the plot.

You’ve seen the trailer and the CGI but if you watch in 3D you’ll see it’s very bad indeed. There’s a scene where Hercules grapples with a lion that looks like a cartoon lion from some 80s animated movie.

The action scenes and ‘feel’ of the film they’ve tried to copy from 300 but sadly get a big zero for. Since they’re aim was to make a PG-13 film there is no blood spatter; all the actually kill scenes are edited out making the action – in slow motion – redundant.

Director Renny Harlin has had a horrible spate of films (too long a list to mention here so check out Rotten Tomatoes) with only three movies – Die Hard 2, Deep Blue Sea and Cliffhanger – being notable exceptions.

Another Hercules movie (by Brett Ratner, so one hopes it will be better) is in the making. You should entirely skip watching The Legend of Hercules or by Zeus you’ll regret it!