The Legend of Hercules by Renny Harlin sets out to reinvent the classic story of Hercules by working more modern themes into the plot. Adding several new plot points including a backstory about slavery and a tale of forbidden love, the film has developed the source material quite a bit. The question is, does it make for a better film? Sadly this new take on the franchise falls flat on its face.

The ancient story of Hercules is one of the most engaging and rich tales known to man, which makes it ever so surprising that the plotline of The Legend of Hercules manages to be so uninteresting. Instead of drawing from its namesake’s wonderful lore, the film instead creates a horribly generic Gladiator esque plot which makes Hercules ( Kellen Lutz ) a slave sold into competitive fighting. Now this on its own could work well with a gritty war movie in the style of 300, but instead the movie takes a sharp left turn into a horrible “love story” which literally reads out like tumblr fanfiction of the film.

But nobody watches action movies for the plot right? It’s all about the violence and brutality! These claims could be valid if not for the fact that The Legend of Hercules cannot even do those correctly. Blood and gore is kept to a minimum, only so the film could achieve “squeaky clean” PG-13 rating, solely to expand the possible viewer base. This censorship greatly detracts from the film and robs the action sequences of almost all of their brutality and tension. Further compounding this issue is how poorly the film portrays Hercules as head and shoulders above most men in terms of combat skill. The hero is supposed to be a literal demigod, yet he consistently gets thrashed and captured by obviously fodder enemies until the end of the film.

The cherry on top of this trash movie sundae is the casting decisions made by Mr. Harlin, they’re horrible. Kellen Lutz was cast as Hercules, yet has about as much animosity and brutality in his words as newborn puppy. The main love interest Hebe (Gaia Weiss) also manages to be the most useless and idiotic character in the film, serving only to be a completely unoriginal motivation for Hercules.

With so many story related problems, only worsened by a cast of no name emotionless actors, The Legend of Hercules should have stayed a myth.