I trust I have made no secret of my love for sword-and-sandal flicks. They are my lodestar and my true north. So if you want to know how I felt when I heard that this year would contain not one movie about Hercules in 3D but two — just think about how Marge Simpson feels about parades. It brought out so many emotions in me: joy, excitement, looking…

This has everything a Hercules movie should have (no disrespect to the Kellan Lutz adaptation, which had a scene where Hercules was fighting all the bad guys and there was a storm and Zeus struck his sword with lightning and it turned into a lightning whip-sword and he whip-sworded all the bad guys with God’s electricity, so I have absolutely zero complaints to make there). What the people want in a Hercules is just the straight-up Twelve Labors, no fillers, with the exception maybe of the Aegean Stables. And if you can’t fit in all twelve, we want the Hydra and the Nemean Lion. We want a ripped dude wearing a lion for a hat fighting a dragon with a million heads, preferably outside of a cave, and we want it to rule. 

Lion hat? Check. Those weird leather wrist cuffs Kevin Sorbo wore on the television series? Check. Dragon with a bunch of heads on it? Check. THE ROCK? DOUBLE CHECK. I want to see a Men’s Health cover sometime in the next six months with a HERCULES WORKOUT on the cover, and I can almost guarantee that this will happen, because we live in a good world that takes care of us.