Bullet Points: Hercules Reborn

The year 2014 was a very good year for the Grecian Hero Hercules. Not only did The Rock play him in Hercules, but that meathead Kellan Lutz played him The Legend of Hercules, and current Lucha Underground Champion Johnny Mundo (John Morrison/John Hennigan) took on the mantle of the mythological badass in this direct to video version titled Hercules Reborn.

Synopsis: The overly confident, over ambitious, and rapishly-jealous General Nikos uses his military prowess to take over the city of Enos, murdering the royalty and taking the beautiful Princess Theodora as his woman. His former captain, and former fiancé to the Princess named Arius, escapes with a handful of men and ventures out to find the legendary Hercules in order to take down the newly formed tyrannical occupation of the city.

• First Things First: I’d like to start this review out on a very positive note; I am a big fan of Christina Wolfe. She is the lovely actress who played the Princess Theodora, a woman who definitely had the worst part during the occupation of Enos by that asshole Nikos. Her parents were both killed in front of her, she was thrown in chains and raped by their murderer, and then she got smacked across the face like half a dozen times. Seriously! Almost every scene that she’s in during the third act Nikos is backhanding her across the mouth. Poor girl…

• Call in the Man: Nikos and his men overtake the city in a very short time and our hero Arius (Christian Oliver) takes off with a few of his buddies to find Hercules (John Hennigan). The best way to describe the situation that they find Herc in is “he’s dealing with some shit”. It’s shown in a flashback that he may or may not have drunkenly murdered his family with a big ass boulder so now he’s drinking wine like Kathie Lee and Hoda from the Today Show. Unsurprisingly, it’s not easy to re-take a city while your number 1 guy is smashed so Arius and his crew have to spend a good amount of time mending his wounds before they can return to Enos.
• Situational Awareness: In what has to be Arius’ worst attribute, he constantly forgets to leave a guard or a sentry and gets ambushed and captured three or four different times. Lucky for him, Hercules is really, really good at killing people.
• The Real Hero: Of course Hercules gets the movie named after him and Arius gets the girl in the end (lucky) but the real hero of this film is Tymek(Jeremy Inman), the cousin of Arius and the only guy to not suck. While Arius and friends are out looking for Hercules Tymek is getting the people of Enos to join together to fight against Nikos and his army of extras. Tymek’s family gets brutally murdered, which, I guess there is no good way to get murdered, but they’re still dead either way so it gives Tymek even more reason to get the people together for a good ole fashioned torch-carrying rebellion. Without him, I don’t think Hercules and Arius would have had a chance.

• The Big Comeback: The good guys get their asses kicked quite a bit in this movie. Hercules fights against the Chippendale looking dude and Arius nearly gets killed by Nikos on multiple occasions. All the while, the lovely Princess tries to root on her man and gets smacked across the face several times for it. Eventually, Nikos and his boy toy both get their due, and Hercules shows up and squishes Nikos’ head like a zit. Arius basically gets to win the hot chick, become King, and live out his days as a balla even though he never really did anything. No wonder Nikos hated him.

You don’t have to go back to ancient times to enjoy these bonus Bullet Points.

• There is a weird Spartacus scene where a bunch of guys stand up and pretend to be Hercules. Their reasoning is less for his protection and more because they’re hammered.
• The people of Enos complain about living in tyranny and not being free but they had a King and Queen even before Nikos took over.
• Hercules pulls out some wrestling moves from his former days as a WWE Superstar, but he forgets to sell at the end of the movie. He pretty much gets the shit beaten out of him by three guys, then just walks it off.
• The use of CGI blood is a tragedy.

The Verdict: Hercules Reborn isn’t the big money shit-show that The Rock’s Hercules was. In fact, Reborn, at times, doesn’t seem like it had much money at all. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It probably has more heart than many of those big budget movies and the cast really looked like they were having fun. I enjoyed John Hennigan/Morrison/Mundo as Hercules more than I expected and Nikos was a very easy guy to hate. The fight scenes felt like they were all filmed too close. With guys like Morrison and his acrobatic moves, we should have been able to see more of it instead of the up-close, quickly edited stuff that we got. Either way, I had fun watching the movie and you will too.