Hercules (2014)

(M) ★★½

Director: Brett Ratner.

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, John Hurt, Rufus Sewell, Ian McShane, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Rebecca Ferguson, Reece Ritchie, Aksel Hennie, Joseph Fiennes.

Hercules was extremely disappointed to learn it was not Silly Hat Day.

Aside from being a cracking Greek myth, Hercules has helped kickstart Arnold Schwarznegger's career, was a linchpin of Italian cinema in the '50s and '60s, and even briefly made Kevin Sorbo a household name.

But do we really need another Hercules movie?

The short answer is 'no', even if Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson looks like he was born (or possibly chiselled from the side of mountain) to play the Greek demi-god.

While there's an intriguing new spin on the tale - that Hercules is more man than myth and part of a band of mercenaries who work for the highest bidder - the execution of this re-invention is lacking and will leave many disappointed.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a Hercules film in which an oiled-up Johnson punches a rabid wolf in the face, then step right up, you strange, strange person.

Much of the familiar Hercules tale is back story this time around, which is refreshing. His 12 trials are slightly exaggerated past accomplishments, retold with regularity by his nephew Iolaus as Hercules and his band of merry mercenaries - the wonky oracle Amphiaraus (McShane), dagger-throwing sidekick Autolycus (Sewell), mute berserker Tydeus (Hennie), and Amazonian archer Atalanta (Berdal) - travel the land seeking gold and adventure.

Their exploits catch the ears of Thracian princess Ergenia (Ferguson), who hires the mercenaries to train her army and help defeat an evil sorcerer.

So far, so formulaic, but to its credit the film takes a detour for its final third that's intriguing enough to help you overlook some of the other nonsense that goes on, such as some very awkward pacing, weird flashbacks/hallucinations, terrible dialogue, and a performance from Johnson that's far from impressive.

This last point is a shame. As one of Hollywood's most likeable lugs, he's been a welcome presence even in bad films - Southland Tales, Race To Witch Mountain, and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island for example.

But here his weaknesses are laid as bare as his impossibly inflated pecs in the film's finale. Hercules' supposedly stirring speeches fall flat (this is also a script problem) and he lacks the acting range to effectively portray the many facets of this particular incarnation of the demi-god, especially the bits revolving around his tortured past and the metaphorical demons lurking in his metaphorical closet.

In the action stakes though, Johnson nails it, and so does director Ratner. The battles are reasonably cool, particularly an opening stoush between the unskilled Thracian army and a horde of tattooed dudes who look like they should all be in metal bands.

But in the grand scheme of things, that battle makes no sense at all and this is where the film falls down. On a dumb action level, sure it's okay, but the script can't live up to the potential of the ideas, especially those surrounding the Hercules myth-building and who he really is, and ends up being confounding and somewhat frustrating.

Hurt adds gravitas as he always does, Sewell and McShane get all the best lines and lighten the mood, and relative newcomer Ferguson is one to watch, while the whole 'Hercules and his merry men (and woman)' thing is fun and enjoyable.

It has its strengths and weaknesses but this isn't quite the legendary film this legendary figure deserves.

Sex Tape

(MA15+) ★

Director: Jake Kasdan.

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper, Rob Lowe.

They couldn't believe how many "hot single women" were "in their area".

Chemistry is everything.

If the lead actors in a relationship-driven film can't make you believe in their relationship, then you've got nothing.

In those terms, Sex Tape is nothing.

Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel, despite both being competent actors who have ably demonstrated chemistry with other actors in the past, have absolutely no chemistry together.

This is a fairly significant problem for a film that opens with them having a lot of sex as boyfriend and girlfriend and then revolves around them as a married couple who make a sex tape in an attempt to revive their relationship.

So, perversely, for a brief moment in the film when their marriage isn't working, you actually believe it because it seems this couple has no chemistry. This is the only time Segel and Diaz are perfect together in this film. The rest of the time, they go together like spikes and a jumping castle.

With no emotional connection between the lead pair, it's difficult to care about their predicament. The fact the film plays out predictably on its one-line premise - couple accidentally share sex tape and then try to retrieve it - means there is little in the way of dramatic tension to elevate the care factor.

The only thing that could save this film would be if it was really funny. Unfortunately it's not really funny.

On the one hand, Sex Tape wants to be a Judd Apatow comedy like This Is 40, offering a frank and occasionally non-PC look at family and married life. On the other hand, it wants to be an absurdly over-the-top comedy along the lines of There's Something About Mary.

Neither of these elements gel. One minute, we're supposed to be laughing at the supposedly universal problems facing a once-randy couple (with no chemistry) whose sex life has dried up like a water balloon in the desert. The next minute, there is a fight between a man and a guard dog, jokes about diarrhoea and epilepsy, and an interlude with a man who loves cocaine, paintings of himself starring in Disney movies, and the metal band Slayer.

All of these things I just mentioned make up a prolonged 15-minute segment in the film that is as boring as it is unfunny, and which appears to be in the movie simply because nothing much else happens and it would have struggled to reach a running time worthy of the term "feature film".

There are a couple of laughs - but only a couple - and they mostly come from Corddry and Kemper as the best friends of Diaz and Segel's couple. This entire movie would likely have been better if Corddry and Kemper swapped roles with Diaz and Segel. They have more chemistry and probably could have sold the switches in comedic tone better.

A better script would have helped. There are some very obvious improvisation bits that don't fit in and seem to have been included because no one could come up with any better jokes, or maybe the screenwriters didn't get much further than the one-line premise.

There's not much to recommend about this film, other than it might have made a great sitcom episode that only ran for 24 minutes.

Instead you have to put up with it for 94 minutes.

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

(M) ★★★★

Director: Matt Reeves.

Cast:  Andy Serkis, Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Toby Kebbell, Judy Greer.

"Grapes? That's not what I thought you sent me to the shops for."

ONE of the biggest cinematic surprises in recent years was Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes - another unwanted reboot/reimagining/prequel that turned out to be one of the best films of 2011.

So here's the sequel to that movie no one wanted and - surprise, surprise - it's also really good.

While not as tautly scripted as its predecessor, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes (known as DOTPOTA from here on in) is another great balance of emotional punch, great characters (all apes), and action thrills.

Eight years after chief chimp Caesar (Serkis) led his fellow chemically enhanced apes to freedom across the Golden Gate Bridge, the world is a very different place. A virus has wiped out much of humanity, with the survivors eking out an existence in small communities, such as one in San Francisco.

At the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge, Caesar's colony is thriving, unaware any humans remain alive.

However a run-in between Caesar's forces and a small group of human survivors led by Malcolm (Clarke) sets in motion a chain of events that will lead the two species to either mutually beneficial peace or bloody war.

DOTPOTA pulls a few of the same tricks as its predecessor (which we will call ROTPOTA), but it's a very different film. Its misty forest and dark broken city settings give a suitably ape-ocalyptic (sorry) vibe to proceedings that's a stark contrast to the warm homely tones and bright clinical labs of the first film.

This is also very much the apes' film. Whereas Caesar (a combination of Serkis' motion-captured performance and some CG wizardry) and his simian sidekicks stole the show last time, this time they own the show.

The interplay and relationships between Caesar, the tortured human-hating bonobo Koba (Kebbell), the wise Bornean orangutan Maurice (Konoval), and Caesar's son Blue Eyes (Thurston) are far more fascinating than those of the humans. While Clarke gets a lot to do as a sort-of go-between for the humans and the apes, Oldman does little but give vaguely rousing speeches and mourn for the past and Russell is a plot device disguised as a doctor.

This doesn't matter though because the apes are the reason to watch. They are wonderfully realised characters built from nuanced performances (particularly from Serkis and Kebbell) and some near flawless special effects.

The moral questions raised, the themes of trust and power, and the emotional moments are no less effective for being provided by a cast of CG primates.

As with ROTPOTA, DOTPOTA (yep, it's ridiculous but stick with me here) takes us to a destination we're expecting - a planet of, well, apes - but does so in an unexpected manner. It's this that helped make the first one so enjoyable and intriguing and the feat is impressive once again here.

While the humans are the weakest link, the apes more than make up for it, creating a sequel that's well worth watching.

Jersey Boys

(M) ★★★

Director: Clint Eastwood.

Cast: John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken, Mike Doyle.

"Push th' li'l daisies an' make 'em come up...."

A musical is often only as good as its songs.

By this rationale, Jersey Boys should be outstanding - Sherry, Walk Like A Man, Big Girls Don't Cry, Can't Take My Eyes Off You, and December, 1963 (Oh What A Night) are all classic tracks.

Unfortunately the rest of the film can't quite live up to the quality of these hits. Jersey Boys is, at best, a great story poorly told, and at worst, a mildly disappointing disservice to the legacy of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.

For those unfamiliar with the stage musical that inspired it or the back story beyond the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame inductees, Jersey Boys tells the story of how Francesco Castelluccio aka Frankie Valli (Lloyd Young), Tommy DeVito (Piazza), and Nick Massi (Lomenda) hooked up with songwriter Bob Guadio (Bergen) and became The Four Seasons.

It's a typical rock 'n' roll story - the troubled upbringings, the initial rejections, the fortuitous break with the "wild new sound", the dizzying highs of hit records and parties and girls, the stresses of life on the road, the broken relationships, the in-fighting, the ultimate come-down, the break-up and the inevitable reunion.

It reads like a list of music biopic clichés or the plot of a film parodying the genre (such as Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, or Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), but it's a cliché for a reason because it's a common trajectory for bands.

In this case, a lot of these aspects have been re-arranged to better suit the familiar arc, but really that's neither here nor there - "based on a true story" is always only ever loosely "based", so don't take this movie as Four Seasons gospel.

What matters is that in laying out this familiar arc, director Eastwood and writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice have laid things out in a weird and frustrating manner.

After rolling along pleasantly and slightly undramatically for much of the film (during which apparently eight years elapses), the beginning of the downward spiral is sprung on the audience, only for the film to then rewind two years and give us all the drama that's been missing.

With much of the dramatic tension and heightened inter-relationships in the band squeezed into an enthralling half an hour, the rest of the film - before and after - feels flat. Plot threads arise seemingly out of nowhere and then disappear and the story's arrangement seems almost random.

The movie really comes to life during the songs, which are worked in unobtrusively via live gigs, TV performances, rehearsals or recording sessions. Jersey Boys is magical when the band plays - Eastwood stages the songs nicely, the actors impress with their vocal skills (yep, they're really singing), and you want to applaud each track when it finishes.

The songs are the saving grace of the film and helps you ignore the dull patches, the occasional flat performances, the strange layout of the plot, the disturbingly bad make-up used to make the band members look older towards the end, and the annoying technique of characters narrating straight to camera. This last matter is of particular frustration because it's utterly redundant (the characters don't tell us anything we don't already know or immediately find out) and it breaks the flow of the film.

Musically, the cast does well (most are veterans of the stage play), but there are some flat performances acting-wise. Lloyd Young struggles in the really dramatic scenes, particularly one where Valli confronts his wayward daughter (another out-of-nowhere plot thread), Lomenda is only just passable, while Walken is okay but seems to have wandered in from a different movie.

It's not all bad. The early scenes, which have a hint of Goodfellas about them, are good, as are the occasional comedic touches, and that brief half an hour where the drama kicks in is excellent. Piazza and Bergen are particularly good, as is Joey Russo as Joe Pesci (yes, that Joe Pesci).

But ultimately this is a two-star movie that gets an extra star for its excellent songs.