Compared to what The Asylum often churn out, Hercules Reborn is watchable. Of the movies they released in 2014, Hercules Reborn is the one that came across to me as the best-looking, the sets and scenery are beautiful and give off a very pleasant atmosphere(even if some of what should be Greece looks more like a desert, a nice-looking desert that said), the photography is also nice, the costumes are well-tailored and convincing- although Princess Theodora's hair does take you out of the period-, the action sequences do contain some excitement and tense and are done with enthusiasm(loved the WWE skills between John Hennigan and Marcus Shirock) and John Hennigan has charisma and handles the action scenes very well. The music is not that authentic but is rousing enough, and Marcus Shirock is fun and menacing in a way that Dylan Vox should have been. The bad news however is that Hercules Reborn in my opinion still was not a good movie. Hennigan is fine in the action sequences, but his dialogue delivery is another matter, it's very wooden and the constant burping and the like got tiresome very fast, outside of the action sequences Hercules disappointingly isn't all that heroic and comes across as somewhat of a "knucklehead". The other acting is not much better, James Duval is annoying and never looks at ease, Christine Ulfsparre is beautiful and sometimes spunky but often vapid and looks out of place within the setting and Dylan Vox is more hammy than threatening. The characters are not too interesting either, very stock good and evil characters with not much depth and development. The story(we'll forget for a second that mythology verges between vaguely realised and ignored) while not dull could have been less standard and predictable and have had more thrills and fun, while the script has a lot of talk but a lot of it sounds very forced and rough draft like(ie. "In time, I will skill you in ways to love me.") and somehow too contemporary-sounding. There have been far worse special effects from the Asylum, but the most convincing they ever get is the blood spurting, the rest have a crude and inconsistently proportioned look to them. And while the action is reasonably good, especially for an Asylum movie, there are not enough of them for such a heroic mythical figure, and a lot of the movie feels under-populated. Overall, Hercules Reborn is a quite mediocre movie but it did not come across as a terrible one either. 4/10 Bethany Cox
