Everything Guardians of the Galaxy gets right with its mix of action and comedy, Hercules botches. OK, I'm biased. I never needed to see another Hercules epic, especially after Twilight's Kellan Lutz stunk up the myth of the Greek demigod in January's dead-on-arrival The Legend of Hercules. But, geez, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson seems born for the role. Apologies to Steve Reeves, Lou Ferrigno, Kevin Sorbo and the other muscle Hollywood hired to flex for the camera, but Johnson packs way more than brawn. The Rock has humor, charm and real acting chops. And director Brett Ratner could boast solid source material in the five-issue Radical Comics series Hercules: The Thracian Wars by the late Steve Moore. They had a shot at something here, and they blew it.
One could be forgiven for being skeptical that a Hercules movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and directed by Brett "Rush Hour Trilogy" Ratner might have a brain in its head, but it actually does. We're not talking Snowpiercer levels of intelligence, but it's far less aggressively stupid than, say, Transformers: Age of Extinction, or Renny Harlin's recent megaflop The Legend of Hercules.