Hercules and Xena The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus Review

Oh boy here is a movie I didn't think i'd be reviewing anytime soon but here we are for you see in the nineties there were two live action shows called Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and it's spin off Xena: Warrior Princess both shows were popular that they decided to make a movie spin off and boy oh boy do I have some thoughts so let's get going shall we.

I would like to tell you what the plot of the movie is but the movie barely has one but the basic premise of the film is Hercules and Xena have to team up with the gods of Mount Olympus to stop the place from being taken over. Yeah this movie doesn't have that much plot in it it just has the basic setup and while the set up does work for an episode of either show it doesn't work for a movie for a movie you need a beginning , a middle and an end here we have a beginning but that's it there's no middle or no end.

Now since this is based of not one but two shows we have alot of returning actors and they are Kevin Sorbo as Hercules , Lucy Lawless as Xena , Michael Hurst as Iolaus , Renee O'Connor as Gabrielle , Alexandra Tydings as Aphrodite and Kevin Smith (not that one) as Ares. The returning cast are decent or as decent as they can be since alot of them aren't that good but out of the returning actors honestly i'd say ether Lucy or Renee are the best ones because they are actually trying.

In terms of new characters we have Josephine Davison as Alcmene and Artemis , Joy Watson as Hera , Peter Rowley as Zeus , David Mackie as Porphyrion , Alison Wall as Tethys and Mnemosyne and Ted Raimi as Crius. The new cast do not fair much better because I cannot recall a single memorable performer i'm not even kidding there all just bland performances.

Now when I usually research a films production history i'll usually find who animated it and in most cases I can usually find out who did it but in this case i'm glad that I couldn't find out who did the animation because the animation is so bad it looks like something that got made cheaply in the 60's instead of something that was cheaply made in the 90's.

If that's not bad enough the characters don't even look like their live action counterparts how do you mess that up you have literally hours worth of footage to sit through so you should be able to make Xena look like Lucy Lawless this is film making 101 and for some reason they made Hercules way to muscular when Kevin Sorbo was never that huge in real life.

Just to give you guys some background information on both shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys started in 1995 and ran until 1999 spanning six seasons I cannot find what network it ran on but it was huge and one of the shows popular characters was Xena who would be given her own spin off series starting in 1995 and ran until 2001 again spanning six seasons and Xena was huge step forward for female led action shows and has thus earned her spot in pop culture history.

I'm not gonna lie and say that both shows were perfect in every way because they weren't but they were at least enjoyably bad you can watch both shows and laugh at how bad they were because they embraced it here tho you can't do that because the film isn't so bad it's good it's just flat out bad and for something that's based on something that's all ready bad that's not a good thing at all.

This movie isn't even ninety minuets it's more like seventy five minuets long and the first three minuets of the film is a dreadful song sequence which adds nothing to the story and it's only purpose is to tell us Hercules's backstory something that fans of the show would already know about so it makes that whole opening pointless.

Like both live action shows the best parts of this movie are the fight scenes since the fight scenes are now animated the team could really go overboard with what the characters could do and to me that adds to the cheese factor of this film and it makes it slightly bearable to watch but given how bad this film is that's not really saying that much.

Overall this film is pretty god damn cheesy but it's not a good movie heck i'd struggle to say it's ok movie there's no wonder this film was released straight to VHS it really is a bad film and it scores a 3.5 out of 10 from me.