Hercules
Here we have Dwayne Johnson d/b/a The Rock in a peculiar take on the Hercules cartoon TV show legend. Hercules and his entourage of pals (played largely by unknowns, save for a slumming Rufus Sewell) roam around Greece as mercenaries. Herc is a demigod, the son of Zeus, except he’s also not — because, gosh darn it, how then could we identify with him? So although he’s talked up in tall tales, Hercules is in fact a demigod normal human sweaty diesel hobo with a bottomless gift card to GNC and a heart as gold as his quaking delts. He’s enlisted to help an old geezer fight some battles, and after forty minutes of Mythbusters: Thrace Edition (centaurs? Ha! Those are just dudes on horses! Take that, entire corpus of Greek mythology!) it turns out he’s just maybe been fighting on the wrong side.
The plot is basic, the characters are grade-school sketches wearing Derelicte and being macho, and it’s kind of hard to follow all the switchbacks — Hercules is special, no he’s not, yes maybe he is, not he’s not, yes, he is, just believe in yourself kids and you can do anything, so long as you take anabolic steroids and win whatever lottery makes you the one professional wrestler in history to actually have a decent movie career. (But it’s cool, I once heard that The Rock went to school in Hamden, Connecticut, so I actually like him. And he’s legitimately fun to watch.) This film rips off Gladiator’s cinematography pretty hard, which you’d think would be a bonus but isn’t. It also serves up some choice lines befitting the B-movie it so badly wants to be, such as “all our physicians were killed, so I taught myself the art of healing” and an old man shrieking “kill the filthy bastard!”
But there’s also one dungeon scene, an admittedly confusing theophany/denouement, that so completely whole-hog commits to going balls-out whatever-this-film-is that it’s worth the price of admission alone.
Haus Verdict: Not sure what it wants to be, but fun all the same. Probably don’t see it, but maybe definitely do. See? I could write this movie!
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
I sort of don’t know what to say here. I like apes. I didn’t like the preceding film, the original reboot (and shouldn’t a planet’s “Rise” follow its “Dawn“?), but this one is actually quite watchable. In brief: Apes, having escaped or something in the last film, now live in the hills by Sausalito, while Gary Oldman and his rugged survivor pals have set up their personal shit-hit-the-fan camp in San Francisco. What follows: Tense encounters in the misty brush. Uneasy alliances. Ape politics. “Ape not kill ape” grunted several times. Betrayals! Apes riding horses and shooting guns. Battles. Slo-mo apes. Tense encounters again. Apes that speak about as much as Andre the Giant but can suddenly pass a TOEFL when the situation calls for complex verb conjugation. You get the drift. All this whilst the apes hold their oh-so-coy mirror to our own behavior. Thing is, it’s really not bad. It drags a bit in the middle but If you’re on the fence, see it.
Haus Verdict: I don’t take back anything I said about the first one, but Dawn is better than it has any business being.
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