Minotaur (2006)

It's got a little of the "Legend" (1985) look about it, but I very much doubt the star will look back on this as one of his finer efforts. It's a shocker! Tom Hardy is "Theo" (Theseus probably refused to lend his name to this nonsense) who decides that he is going to sneak into the minotaur's labyrinthine lair and sort it out once and for all - apparently it has already eaten his girlfriend and so he is a tad irked. Anyway, off he goes and away we go into an abject farce of a film. This is a great story from Greek myth; it's got the whole gamut of adventure elements from which to pick - so how come Jonathan English has managed to squander such a rich vein and come up with this badly produced, shockingly scripted affair with special effects that were around in the days of "Blake's 7" on the television thirty years earlier? Tony Todd has a look of evil for his depiction of the permanently zonked King Deucalion but as for the the rest of the cast - including a tiny cameo from Rutger Hauer as his father "Cyrnan"; the acting is just plain risible. "Curse the God... Slay the Beast" offers us a far more exciting tagline than this delivers - and I am sorry to say that even on television late at night after two bottles of your favourite tipple, the most ardent fans of TH (or the also handsome Lex Shrapnel) are going to be looking for "Downton Abbey" repeats on a streamer somewhere.