Hit and Myth

Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures' action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It's a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating a world that an audience can escape into, these movies presuppose a pseudo-hip TV frame of reference. And the action they stick into the frame makes a deliberate mishmash of a viewer's mental circuitry: Any response to what happens on-screen begins to seem appropriate.

When Steve Buscemi enters Con Air in a Hannibal Lecter getup, moviegoers react with the same laughter as when Billy Crystal made his Lecter entrance for the Oscar show. A similar chaotic pandering permeates Hercules. It's not enough that Paul Shaffer be cast as Hermes, the winged messenger (it's actually a funny casting idea) -- there also has to be a shot of him slamming the piano keys the way he does for David Letterman.

Despite logistics, labor and expense that are "all on the screen," Hercules emerges as a tuckered-out, off-the-top-of-the-head extravaganza. What makes this desperate farce-spectacle so sad is that it's an outgrowth of the earned success of Aladdin, also from directing team John Musker and Ron Clements. This team kicked off Disney's mainstream resurgence with The Little Mermaid in 1989, which paved the way for a peak achievement by another Disney team in Beauty and the Beast. Musker and Clements broke through artistically with Aladdin in 1992. They realized that Robin Williams's genie, spouting show-biz gags from many ages, could serve as both the id and the teen spirit of their Arabian Nights adventure -- and they smartly built their film around him.

Following the financial disappointments of Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules has been positioned not just as a crowd-pleaser but also a crowd-regainer. But unlike Aladdin, Hercules is all patter, ranging from snappy to sappy. There's nothing to ground it except a tepid reworking of the life of a brawny demigod. In it, he learns that what makes a hero isn't "the size of his strength but the strength of his heart" -- at least, thus spake Zeus. (Or did he say the size of his heart? When Disney gods start hurling platitudes, better duck and cover.) Elements of every recent Disney hit pour into this movie's mix. Mount Olympus functions like the regal cliffside in The Lion King. Hercules is Simba-esque: a boy who feels like an outcast and a misfit until he takes up his proper legacy. Once again a Disney hero gets guidance from the vision of his father and from comical sidekicks, primarily a pedagogical satyr named Philoctetes, or "Phil" (Danny DeVito). Once again a Disney hero gets thwarted by the epitome of evil, in this case Hades himself (James Woods).

In the traditional myth, Hercules was half-human from the start, a love child Zeus sires with an earthly woman. Zeus's wife Hera, always hostile to the products of Zeus's innumerable extramarital liaisons, took a special dislike to Hercules, whose Olympian genes gave him super strength. Hera tormented him with bouts of fury; he became known for exploding, most spectacularly when he went on a blind homicidal rampage against his wife and their sons. Hercules's 12 labors were designed as penance for this atrocity. He embodied male rage and the frustration and regret that keep fueling it.

How simple is Disney's First Book of Mythology? Well, in this Hercules, he starts out as a full-fledged god, the son of Zeus and Hera. His nemesis here is Hades. The lord of the underworld feels that Hercules is the only one who can block his path to cosmic domination. Hades's evil gremlins, Pain and Panic (Bobcat Goldthwaite and Matt Frewer), dose him with their own "Grecian formula" and make him mortal. (He stays super-powerful because he doesn't drink to the last drop.)

It's understandable that the Disney filmmakers would take the sexual rivalry out of Hercules' origins. What's disappointing is their rendering of Hercules' character. He's merely a mildly confused good guy, unsure of why he feels lost on earth and then uncertain of how to get back to where he once belonged: Olympus.

Along the way to redemption, society reduces Hercules to a celebrity -- the Greek equivalent of a sports star defeating an opposing team of monsters. On TV specials and in magazine promos, the Disney team to a man and woman has espoused a party line, telling us that they didn't want to make this movie "academic," despite its being the first Disney cartoon based on a classical myth. Sure enough, in the opening minutes Charlton Heston's senatorial tones give way to a gospel Greek chorus; they revolt against making the story sound like "some Greek tragedy" instead of the supposedly rollicking adventure we're about to see. Actually, what's "academic" about Hercules aren't the few remaining remnants of Greek legend, but the tried-and-untrue Disney motifs. The irreverence that Musker and Clements have made their specialty comes off as a restless, reckless tic. They lampoon Hercules's commercial marketing in the agora -- they seem to think that their awareness of Disney-style exploitation excuses their practice of it. It's as if they're telling critics, "We're not doing what the hucksters in the film do, merchandising an icon of dumb valor; we're merchandising a man who, as our theme song says, is willing to sacrifice, endure pain and 'Go the Distance'." In this film, it's hard to distinguish self-criticism from self-promotion. Some of it is funny: I laughed when Pain (or was it Panic?) reported to Hades in Air-Herc sandals. But doesn't the gag about Hercules becoming an action figure merely sell the action figure in real life? This movie's overstuffed bag of tricks falls apart, because nothing in it is organic or interlocked -- including that kicky chorus, crosshatched out of Dreamgirls and The Gospel at Colonus.