What do you get when you combine “300” + “Immortals” + “Gladiator” + Kellan Lutz + a very meager budget? Well, you get “Hercules: The Legend Begins,” and the results aren’t pretty.
Running three minutes long, the trailer is basically a walkthrough of the movie, with a story that includes your standard elements of forbidden love and exile. It’s filled out by numerous scenes that are supposed to be stunning in their size and scope, but come off as rather cheap digital effects and even worse green screen work. All of this is emphasized by tics borrowed from other filmmakers (mostly Zack Snyder) including speed ramping and the actors yelling their lines in closeup while you ponder just how little was spent on this endeavor.
And it’s a bit of a bummer too, because the man behind the camera is Renny Harlin. The man who once gave us “Die Hard 2” is reduced to this: a second rate Hercules movie that will be crushed by the Brett Ratner/Dwayne Johnson version arriving next year.
But they’ll try anyway. “Hercules: The Legend Begins” opens sometime in 2014.
