Director Brett Ratner's "Hercules" respects your time and your bloodlust. It slices through 97 insanely violent PG-13-rated minutes in a sort of extended digital blurt, pausing just often enough for Dwayne Johnson to reload his guns (not that kind, the other kind), or for John Hurt (as the king of Thrace) to rasp "Unleash the wolves!" because Liam Neeson already said "Release the Kraken!" in the "Clash of the Titans" remake.
The picture is yanked from leftover parts of "Gladiator," "300," "The Expendables" and, who knows, "Police Academy VII: Mission to Moscow." The script by Ryan J. Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos works from the five-part Radical Comics saga "Hercules: The Thracian Wars." The Hercules we see here is not the traditional mythological wonder but an ordinary human, at least by Dwayne Johnson standards — a former street urchin (Rufus Sewell, offering nicely cured ham, plays his lifelong comrade) who joins the Athenian army, acquits himself and eventually becomes a mercenary for hire. He's looking for one last score so he can put his bloody past behind him and retire peaceably to the Home for Aged Greek Landmarks and Former Professional Wrestlers.
Herc's gang is a lively and varied bunch. Ian McShane plays the mystic Amphiaraus, whose intimations of his own mortality turn out to be amusingly off-base. The Norwegian actress Ingrid Bolso Berdal gives Xena: Warrior Princess a run for her money as the Amazonian warrior Atalanta, a dab hand with a bow and arrow. Herc's nephew (Reese Ritchie) is a balladeer of sorts, spreading the Hercules-as-demigod stories everywhere they go.
A beleaguered princess (Rebecca Ferguson) makes Herc and company an offer: Help my dad, the king, fight our enemy Rhesus (Tobias Santelmann),and we'll reward you handsomely. One training montage later, the ragtag Thracians learn to be part of an effective fighting unit. Ratner's movie works the same way. Its contradictory and playfully anachronistic bits somehow feel like part of the same breathless, unpretentious enterprise. Ratner's sense of humor is never clever, or light, and I've hated my share of his earlier films, but not this one. (Or "Tower Heist.") He's enough of a low-rent showman to keep the spears and arrows and blades and clubs aimed right at your face, over and over and over.
"Don't just stand there, kill someone!" Sewell says at one point. One wonders if he, Hurt and McShane sat around the set in between takes, competing in a raspy-but-charming bellowing contest.
"Hercules" - 3 stars
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense combat action and violence, and for some sensuality)
Running time: 1:37