Whose Daring Deeds Are Great Theater? HERCULES

If you had to pick one working actor who could play a convincing Hercules, it would have to be Dwayne Johnson. (It certainly wouldn’t be Kellan Lutz. Just ask Renny Harlin.) The man formerly known as The Rock has the right solid body-builder muscle and charismatic broad-shoulder, wide-stance confidence to be believed as the ultimate demigod strongman of Greek myth. That’s the key here: believable myth. Hercules, the latest telling of the legend, imagines Hercules as a troubled mercenary with a tragic past who spreads exaggerated tales of his parentage and deeds to get work and scare enemies. When he stomps in wearing the pelt of a lion for a cape, the mane flowing down his armored back, a massive spiked club held lightly in his huge hands able to smack down five men with a single blow, it’s easy to see how little a leap it takes to believe the legends.

From Italian peplum pictures to a Disney musical, the character of Hercules has a lot of versatility. Screenwriters Ryan J. Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos (of a bunch of direct-to-video DisneyToon sequels) adapt Steve Moore’s comics into a relatively small-scale adventure. At least it’s not a big brooding bore. The open sequence is a rapid-fire retelling of Hercules myths with the hulking demigod fighting impossible monsters: a hydra, a giant boar, a massive lion. It’s a fun, splashy creature feature and a tease, as it is revealed to be a story told by one of Hercules’ band of mercenaries. The storyteller (Reece Ritchie) is joined by an Amazonian archer (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), a seer (Ian McShane), a swordsman (Rufus Sewell), and a mute feral man (Aksel Hennie). Then in walks the man himself. It takes a lot of people to spread the carnage they pin on their leader. Good thing, with dreams, visions, and optical illusions, ancient Greece is a place used to thinking of itself as supernatural.

But Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules more than merely looks the part. He acts like it, too, even if his immense strength is merely at the extreme upper edge of mortal strength. That’s still not so bad, if you ask me. And in battle he can certainly handle himself well, taking out hundreds of enemy combatants while his colleagues help him pick off the rest and the people who hired them cower from a safe distance. This allows the big guy to fake out the people with talk of his Gods-given power and then walk the walk by, say, hiding an arrowhead between his knuckles so it looks like he kills an enemy warrior with one punch. Smart idea. Above all, I liked his arc from guy who says he’s a legend to a guy who works hard to become his own legend. If anyone could do that and pull it off, it’s The Rock.

After some introductory throat-clearing that introduces us to the world of this Hercules, Herc and friends are hired by a king (John Hurt), his daughter (Rebecca Ferguson), and his general (Peter Mullan), to help stop troublemakers giving his villages a beating and working their way slowly to the castle. Complications and battles ensue, with plenty of swordplay, archery, spear-throwing, chariot-riding and other forms of ancient combat. At one point, Hercules flips a horse over his head. I think that’s when I knew I was fully sold on this movie’s brand of action, which is just over-the-top enough to be pleasantly silly. It helps that there’s some comic relief that really works, keeping the whole thing from getting too self-serious. I especially liked the running joke that develops out of McShane’s insistence that he’s psychically aware of when he’ll die. Before one battle, Hercules asks if it’s his time. “No,” he replies, “but I’m not sure about yours.”

It’s a sturdy, old-fashioned adventure with an eye for bright battle sequences and some moderately engaging ancient intrigue. It’s a movie wherein everyone involved seems to be on the same page about the kind of movie they were making. The cast is all likable wooden archetypes and the look has a glossy but humble B-movie charm. It also looks about as cheap as an expensive movie can look, with few standing sets, a couple dodgy CGI crowd shots, and lots of exterior location work. It’s knowingly small and chopped up. A few short and awkwardly inserted flashbacks involving Hercules’ backstory (including small roles for model Irina Shayk as his wife and Joseph Fiennes as a king) seem like vestigial plot points from a longer cut. But the whole thing is scrappy, and good enough in most respects.

Director Brett Ratner has little in the way of personal style, always slickly and competently executing the screenplay before him with his collaborators. (That’s how he’s managed a career split about evenly between entertaining schlock and schlock schlock.) His Hercules is an empty calorie dumb fun machine that keeps the pace up and spirits high. By the final plot complications and climactic confrontations, I was even invested in how it would resolve. I liked the studio programmer throwback appeal to a time when a big studio would make small and simple lazy-day matinee fare. Maybe it just succeeds in lowering expectations, the better to mildly exceed them, but, hey, when it works it works. 

Travel Nightmare: CHERNOBYL DIARIES

Chernobyl Diaries is one of those horror movies where the entire plot hinges on one very convincing idiot who can get the whole group to go along with his ideas. In this case the idiot is Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), an American living in Kiev who has the bright idea to take his brother Chris (Jesse McCartney), who is backpacking around Europe with Natalie (Olivia Dudley), his girlfriend, and Amanda (Devin Kelley), her friend, on an extreme getaway. (The characters have these names, but it’s much easier to keep track of them as Brother 1 and Brother 2, blonde and brunette.) They show up at a hole-in-the-wall where they meet their fellow travelers (Nathan Phillips and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and board a sketchy van driven by Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), a hulking tour guide. Destination: Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, the worst in history.

The others weren’t too sure about this trip, but Paul (Brother 1, the aforementioned convincing idiot) talked them into it. All that remains at Chernobyl is a radioactive ghost town. What danger could there be? For a while, the trip goes just fine for these tourists. The guide reassures them that they won’t be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation since they’ll only be staying an hour or two. There are guards at a checkpoint that won’t let them in. That’s kind of weird. Even weirder, the guide drives the group in through the back way, down a rundown, woodsy path. Still, though, nothing too dangerous, they suppose. They walk around the ghost town. They see some modern day ruins. They take some pictures. They joke around. They look off into the distance and marvel at the huge nuclear reactor that now sits unused. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.

First time director Bradley Parker does some nice work with silence and the mundane, a trick he no doubt picked up from producer and co-writer Oren Peli, whose incredibly low-budget massive hit Paranormal Activity helped to ignite a new craze of found-footage films. (Funnily enough, the other writers are Carey and Shane Van Dyke, who wrote the direct-to-DVD Paranormal Entity, no relation to Peli’s hit series.) This one starts off with found footage in a smeary, consumer-grade digital montage of London and Paris, but luckily drops that conceit just before the title card, trading it in for wobbling hand-held camerawork of a more traditional kind.

For the longest time, the twenty-somethings just fumble through their tour, getting freaked out a little from time to time, but nothing they can’t handle. Most of the suspense comes from the way the blonde’s shirt has only half of the buttons fastened properly. But then cell phone reception is bad, eventually nonexistent, and batteries die and nightfall is approaching. Things get ominous real quick, but it’s hard to feel too bad about a bunch of barely developed, empty-headed, gullible characters who walk knowingly past obvious warning signs. (Travel tip: if you go to a dangerous place in a foreign country with a stranger, tell someone else where you’re going and when you’ll be back. Or, you know, don’t go.)

Somehow, the van’s wiring has been cut and so they’re stranded. Should they stay in the van and wait for sunrise? Things go bump in the night and slowly the group decides to split up and then someone inevitably disappears. The next day, splitting up once more, they go looking for the missing member of their tour group. Bad move. I’ll give you one guess as to who talks the group into most of the decisions they make. You can probably also guess that characters get injured or go missing with predictable results. Some are found dead, others alive, but either way there’s a lot of the movie spent wandering around an abandoned town shouting “Uri!” or “Natalie!” or “Chris!” over and over again. Of course they’re not alone here. Someone or something is clearly menacing them and it’s not just the loud dogs that are good for a “Boo!” or two. It turns out the place is haunted (or is that inhabited?) by people who like to stand in the background or sometimes jump out of shadows and grab at you for no real reason. They must know they’re not real characters or real specters or zombies or even much of a tangible threat. They’re just set dressing.

Obviously this is not the most respectful way to treat an all-too-real disaster, but the filmmakers don’t even have the guts to use their exploitative premise to exploit much of anything. The first half or so of the movie makes some effective use of the setting, the way the slowly crumbling buildings of the town are flash-frozen in time, eerily still and quiet. When a character hears something rattling around down the hall, it’s spooky. There shouldn’t be anyone there. When someone goes to investigate and the camera stays with those left behind, that’s genuinely creepy. As more of the characters disappear and I found myself not really caring one way or the other, the movie stopped being even slightly scary.

By the time we see more and more of the creeps limping out of the shadows, what little tension that has accrued slips away. And let’s not even talk about the ending, which is unbelievably, eye-rollingly predictable, but which I won’t reveal here because, who knows, maybe you’ll still see it at some point. I guess the way the movie ends is no more generic than the rest of it, though. This isn’t a movie out to subvert cliché, or to do the same old thing in an inventive way. It’s a movie that’s just interested in checking all the boxes, getting the obvious done and getting out. The movie’s not good enough to recommend or bad enough to hate. It just is.