Diminishing returns, redeeming features, deeply disjointed

Rating: Null/10 (6 September 1999)

The familiar package, with added interest for students of mythology, with which Disney plays fast and loose (though no more so than Ovid in first-century Rome, whose 'Metamorphoses' did some pretty outrageous things to Greek legend).
Though standard issue Disney in the main, and often seeming pretty weary, there's some food for thought. Leaving aside the tidying-up of Olympus's somewhat irregular sexual politics, Disney also adds an implicit but insistent christianisation of the pagan story in the closing stages. Hercules is re-read as Orpheus crossed with Christ, proving his divinity by sacrificing himself for his Eurydice rather his Megaera; the Greek names were mostly chosen to provide English diminutives, hence Philoctetes ('Phil') instead of Chiron, trainer of heroes. Philoctetes is the maimed hero in Sophocles's play of that name.] There's something of the same in Aladdin, incidentally: the leitmotif of biting into apples is always associated there with knowledge, recognition and of course sex - it's straight out of Genesis.
Disney being Disney, the sacrifice here is of the sort that doesn't in fact entail any sacrifice, so the Christianity is skin deep. Herc doesn't really give up his life, Meg doesn't give up her unblemished complexion or neatly arranged costume despite being squished by a whopping great column, and not becoming an Olympian god frankly doesn't seem much of a sacrifice at all, given that the place is a dull, self-congratulatory cocktail party. But Disney has always asserted the right of successful cultural imperialists to appropriate other people's cultures - rather like them ancient Romans again. They often do it pretty well.
Cinematically there's not a lot of inventiveness on show on the large scale, though there's the usual teeming ingenuity in the details. Also present and correct are well-staged songs with poor lyrics and forgettable tunes (Alan Menken writes excellent orchestral scores but he's rarely a big tune writer, he's a motivic composer like Sondheim - and Howard Ashman was irreplaceable). Most of the principal characters are drawn entirely from an increasingly depleted looking stock.
An honourable exception is James Woods's interesting Hades, a wheeler-dealer demon with a barely controlled undercurrent of rage. The portrayal of death and the underworld is pretty dark by Disney standards, so that the film (like the studio) seems torn between increasingly edgy material in some scenes, and increasingly gooey, bog-standard sentimental moralising in others - as though each is somehow meant to compensate for the other. It's oddly unstable for such a commercialised package.