《大力神：色雷斯之战》

    Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Joseph Fiennes, Peter Mullan, John Hurt

    Director: Brett Ratner

    The mythical Greek strongman gets a refreshingly human spin in Brett Ratner’s grandly scaled, solidly entertaining popcorn picture.

    ON paper, Brett Ratner sounds like such an improbable choice to direct a large-scale ancient Greek epic that, going into his “Hercules,” one could only hope for a less aggressively preposterous affair than Renny Harlin’s “The Legend of Hercules” from earlier this year.

    The happy surprise is that Ratner’s “Hercules” is more than a mere improvement on its predecessor. It’s a grandly staged, solidly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure movie that does something no other Hercules movie has quite done before: it cuts the mythical son of Zeus down to human size.

    Ratner’s film owes its counter-canonical premise to late author Steve Moore, whose five-issue Radical Comics series “Hercules: The Thracian Wars” proffered a Herc who was markedly more man than god, his supposedly divine paternity a useful legend but perhaps no more than that.

    For the movie version, screenwriters Ryan J. Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos have sanded down many of Moore’s rougher edges (including his Hercules’ volatile temperament and bisexuality) to make a more family-friendly enterprise, but they’ve built on the idea of the warrior hero as a self-conscious mythmaker, inventing practical, real-world explanations for all of his seemingly superhuman feats.

    The stories prove good for business, Hercules being in the mercenary-for-hire trade, which he practices in concert with a quartet of trusted confidants: Autolycus (Rufus Sewell), a childhood friend who rose with the orphaned Hercules through the ranks of the Athenian army; the fearsome Amazonian warrior Atalanta (Ingrid Bolso Berdal); shell-shocked mute Tydeus (the impressive Norwegian actor Aksel Hennie, from “Headhunters”); and mystical seer Amphiaraus (a superbly hammy Ian McShane).

    Opportunity knocks in the form of Princess Ergenia (Rebecca Ferguson), who implores Hercules and his cohorts to come to the aid of her embattled father, the kindly King Cotys (John Hurt), whose kingdom of Thrace finds itself at war with the powerful sorcerer Rhesus (Tobias Santelmann). So off to Thrace they go, with the objective of turning Cotys’ population of tenant farmers into a skilled fighting army.

    “Hercules” consists primarily of three elaborate battle scenes held together by some quickly dispatched exposition, and the first — and grandest — of them is a genuine stunner. Arriving at the smoldering remnants of a village seemingly destroyed by Rhesus’ army, Hercules’ troops find themselves ambushed by legions of steely eyed warriors in camouflaged body paint, and the violent rumble that ensues is staged by Ratner and ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti in clean, coherent pieces of action that build steadily in intensity.

    If “Hercules” isn’t quite as compelling off the battlefield as on, it certainly never dawdles, clocking in at just under 90 minutes and keeping ever-mindful that the audience for a movie like this is there for the big guns (or, in this case, the big swords) and not the small talk. At its best, the movie harks back to the unpretentious fantasy adventures of an earlier era.

    The movie is now being screened in Hong Kong.

    (SD-Agencies)