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Possibly the worst sin a film can commit is to be boring. A good film, and especially a very good film, is a thing of joy. A film that draws you in, engages you, makes you think — that film is something to treasure and watch again and again and again. The opening sequence of Reservoir Dogs is as fine an example of tight, sharp scripting as I have seen, and bears endless re-watching; decades after its release, the jokes in Life of Brian have yet to pale. A bad film, even, can be a memorable experience — twenty-mumble years after I saw it, I still feel the rage I felt the night I saw the inexplicably popular Wings of Desire (no, I won’t link to it; it doesn’t deserve it), the bitter resentment I had for Wim Wenders, the man responsible for stealing the hours and hours and hours (no, it wasn’t really that long; it just felt like it) I spent watching this pretentious, self-indulgent mound of Teutonic bollocks.

Hercules

Films should inspire some kind of response in their viewers. But Hercules doesn’t. It’s not a bad film — certainly not bad enough to be interesting, and that’s the root of the problem with it. The story, such as it is, seems to involve Hercules (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; God knows who told the man he could act, but whoever it was, they were woefully mistaken) being hired by the unscrupulous Cotys, King of Thrace (John Hurt, who I didn’t realise needed a paycheque quite this badly), to fight Rheseus (Tobias Santelmann). Because Hercules, you see, in this re-imagining of the legend, isn’t the divine hero of Greek legend, but a man, albeit a quite creatively-muscled man; the film is based not on the fabled figure of legend, but on a graphic novel, Hercules: The Thracian Wars. It starts with a moderately entertaining bit of exposition, with a backstory explained by Iolaus (Reece Ritchie), the storyteller who accompanies Hercules and the mercenaries he leads. But it doesn’t really explain why Hercules is no longer the demigod of myth, and suddenly a slightly grubby mercenary, and that’s the direction the film now heads.

Accompanying Hercules are an inexplicably odd bunch. Amphiaraus (Ian McShane, who really should know better) is a seer of some sort; quite why he is travelling the Grecian countryside with a bunch of fighters remains unclear. Autolycus (Rufus Sewell, who appears to be having a decent amount of fun), Atalanta (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, whose primary role, it would appear, is to look good in a leather bikini) and Tydeus (a quite forgettable Aksel Hennie) do the typically predictable job of taking a seemingly useless bunch of Thracian soldiers and turning them into an unstoppable fighting machine.

Fighting, inevitably, starts. There are a couple of set-piece fight sequences that are well-filmed, but, as is the problem with the entire film, they’re just a little dull. We know little of the Thracians, who they are or why they need the services of Hercules and his crew. We know even less of Rheseus and why he has it in for Thrace. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to engage with the story, and even harder to care about the battles. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that Hercules et al survive their skirmishes; the battle scenes, then, are simply set pieces for director Brett Ratner to have a bit of fun. It is, I accept, entirely possible that there was some fantastically lucid and articulate exposition to clarify these points; if there were, it would have been while I was wondering what I was having for tea when I got home, and allowing viewers’ thoughts to drift that badly is simply unacceptable in a film.

And so the film continues. It focuses, reasonably enough, on the central character of Hercules, but Dwayne Johnson simply isn’t enough of an actor to carry the role. Everyone else in the cast, it appeared, knew that this was a comedy — at the very least that’s how McShane and Sewell play it — but Johnson is stiff and ernest and almost entirely devoid of anything even resembling charisma, or charm, or warmth, throughout the entire film. He isn’t up to the task, and, presumably, was cast on the strength of his unfeasibly monstrous muscles, which get an airing in every scene. He’s not a pleasant man to look at, isn’t The Rock — muscly is all well and good, but please, keep your biceps in proportion to the rest of your body, and there’s nothing attractive about veins bulging out of limbs like subcutaneous lengths of randomly-knotted rope. Johnson would appear to be on his way to becoming the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his generation, but he lacks even Arnie’s screen presence.

As a result, you’re left staring at a very uninteresting film, and the mind will, when there’s nothing in the story, or the script, or the acting, to occupy it, start asking questions that maybe Ratner should have asked himself when he took on the project. Why isn’t the eponymous hero called Heracles? That was, after all, the mythological figure’s original Greek name, the film is set in Greece, not Rome, and much is made of the jealousy felt by Hera, wife of Heracles’ father Zeus. Is Hercules in fact divine, and do Centaurs actually exist? For that matter, is Cerberus real? Ratner seems unable to decide for himself, and so the film swings rather wildly from one viewpoint to another. Why, in a 3D film, are the backdrops to many of the city scenes so painted-backdrop flat?

The end of the film, which comes after a mercifully short 98 minutes, seems to be setting up a sequel; indeed, for much of its running time, Hercules felt like the pilot episode for a TV series — hesitant, uncertain, laying the groundwork for a longer story but not quite sufficiently sure of itself to hit its stride. As a result, this is an unsatisfying disappointment of a film. Characters are inadequately developed, actors are either utterly out of their depth (Johnson is so wooden that “The Oak” would make a better nickname) or either so camp (that would be McShane, who clearly has lost all self-respect and forgotten that he’s better than this) or so scenery-chewing (John Hurt is, well, John Hurt, and hence not entirely capable of making a bad film, but here he’s basically John Hurt as John Hurt as Cotys, snarling and sneering his way through every line) that they seem not to be taking the film they’re in particularly seriously. The story is half-arsed, weak and under-told.

So not a good film, then, not by any stretch. But also not even a bad film. Hercules is simply a film, an utterly unremarkable re-telling of a very remarkable story. And that’s very, very disappointing.