Yes, I know it's been a long time since I've actually typed up anything resembling a review on this pathetic blog. I could ramble on and on about how things get in the way, I'm suffering from writer's block (or more accurately, "blogger's block". That's stupid), I'm obscenely lazy, yadda, yadda, yadda... The truth is, I don't care. And let's be honest, Dear Imaginary Reader, you don't care, either.
That's the beauty of the internet. Nobody really cares. We all just pretend we care about one topic or another, vehemently arguing either for or against said topic, until we've exhausted our very limited supply of feigned outrage, and then we wander off into our kitchens and gorge ourselves on processed food until our stomachs ache before slipping into a vegetative state in front of our state-of-the-art flat screen televisions as the latest edition of Guess Who Farted? assaults our rapidly decaying grey matter.
It's only natural.
And since it's been established that none of us care, it's time to talk about Conan The Barbarian. No, not the good Conan The Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The other Conan The Barbarian starring that caveman-looking dude from the SciFi Channel original series Stargate: Atlantis.
Our story begins with some truly out-of-place narration by Morgan fucking Freeman, who apparently had a little free time in between voice-over recording sessions for his excellent Science Channel series Through The Wormhole and also owed the wrong people a fair bit of coin in unpaid gambling debts. He yammers over some dull bullshit about necromancers and a mask made out of their bones that supposedly makes the wearer a god among men. It has something to do with mastery over death, which we all know is right in a necromancer's wheelhouse. That's about all necromancers are good for, am I right, D&D nerds?!
I don't know what that means, having never played Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe necromancers are the ultimate badass of the pen and paper RPG community. I'll have to ask my pal Titus about that. He's a big D&D nerd. And if you wrong him, he will unleash the fury of a supernova on your unsuspecting ass. Remember the ballad of the Black Revenger.
Anyhoo, the ancient douchebag who wore the mask in ancient times was royally fucked up by a bunch of pissed off barbarian tribes, and these dim-witted barbarians subsequently shattered the mask into a number of fragments, each tribe taking one fragment with them, scattering them to the far corners of the ancient world, so that they could never be reformed.
Quick question: why didn't these dullards just crush the fragments of the mask into a fine powder with their implements of destruction? Seems to me, that would have solved the problem right there. Obviously, some power-mad lunatic in the future was going to get the wild idea of reuniting the fragments, wearing the mask, and becoming the new god-king of all he surveys. Don't these barbarians know anything?
The story then jumps ahead to... less ancient-but still very ancient-times, where a war between two barbarian tribes is taking place. Bearded Ron Perlman's very pregnant wife is mortally wounded by some asshole who hates women in leather armour, and she pleads with her hirsute husband to gaze upon the face of her child before she croaks. Being a doting husband, Perlman performs a barbarian ceasarian section, cutting baby Conan free from the fleshy confines of his momma's womb.
She names the baby Conan (oh shit, I spoiled the reveal) and promptly dies, because her entrails are dangling below her knees, already attracting ants. Conan grows up tall, and he grows up right, with those Cimmerian boys on those Cimmerian nights, single-handedly slaughtering a cadre of angry savages covered in war paint who slightly resemble feral Mohawk indians and produce anguished pig sounds from their tortured throats.
I learned later on that these savages were identified as "picts" in the end credits, which makes absolutely no sense. Did the filmmakers realize that picts were a real tribe of people living in Scotland during the Iron Age?
Anyway, Kid Conan takes on these honking monsters all by his lonesome while all of the older warriors-in-training cut and run like Hyborean pussies. KC chops off their offending heads and brings them home to his proud poppa, a rare feat for a young lad whose balls have yet to drop. Shortly after this touching father-son bonding moment, Stephen Lang wanders into the film with his rainbow coalition of soldiers and his delightfully brain-damaged sorceress-in-training daughter.
As it turns out, Stephen Lang (wait for it...) has undertaken the quest to reunite the shattered fragments of the Mask Of DOOM in order to become the all-powerful ruler of all he surveys. Honestly, who saw that coming?
Lang's already visited the other barbarian tribes and procured their puzzle pieces, and Bearded Ron Perlman's the last stop on his "Drooling Mayhem Maskapalooza" tour. To make a long story short, the final piece of the mask is taken, Perlman gargles molten steel, and Kid Conan lives to vow revenge on his newly-minted nemesis.
Suddenly, Morgan Freeman picks up his narration, rambling boredly about how Conan came of age surrounded by pirates and bandits and whatnot, never forgetting the tragedy that forged him in his youth and... you get the point.
It is at this point that I regret to inform you that I have no idea what happens next in the narrative. It's just a blur of mediocrity. Conan... does some stuff... he has a pirate buddy... I think he breaks a horse's neck with a chain... hijinks...?... yeah, I got nuthin.
I didn't have this problem with the original Conan The Barbarian. That movie is burned into my memory.
He's sold into slavery, spends the remainder of his youth strapped to the Wheel Of Pain, transforming him into the solid wall of granite that catches the eye of a slaver who grooms him for fierce gladitorial combat, he learns what is best in life, educates himself with a series of scrolls when he isn't raping slave girls, eventually earns his freedom, is nearly killed by wild dogs before finding a lost tomb where he discovers an ancient Atlantean sword, fucks a sorceress who turns into a werewolf before throwing her into a fireplace, meets his BFF Subotai and his main squeeze Valeria, and runs headlong into his destiny when he finds the charismatic cult leader Thulsa Doom, the man who slaughtered his family.
This new Conan movie has nothing so notable. he doesn't even seem to be searching for the madman who killed his daddy. All things considered, this version of Conan is seemingly content with his boozing, fucking pirate lifestyle, untroubled by the tragedy that was supposed to make him the vengeance-fueled killing machine we all know and love. Also troubling is the fact that this Conan doesn't have a Subotai, instead relying on a rotating cast of poorly-realized characters to help him out of various sticky situations.
He also doesn't have a Valeria, a strong-willed and capable woman who serves not only as a love interest but also as a viable companion for Conan who will always have his back when battle is joined. No, we're stuck with Tamara, played by Rachel Nicols. She's training to be some kind of nun, but she happens to be the only person left alive who is a pureblood descendant of the necromancers of yore, and Stephen Lang needs her blood to consecrate the bone mask in order to gain ultimate power.
She contributes nothing to the narrative on her own. She's just a macguffin, a plot device, not a character at all. The only reason Conan eventually fucks her is because there is nobody else to fuck.
The only other notable female in the narrative is Stephen Lang's daughter, played by Rose McGowan as an adult, and she is more interested in her father as a sexual partner than poor Conan.
Conan gets his chocolate mixed with Tamara's peanut butter when he realizes that Lang wants her precious blood, and so he uses her as a convenient way to set up a meeting with the villain, sos he can keell heeem.
Stephen Lang (I don't remember his character's name and don't care enough to look it up), who's supposed to be a pretty badass guy on his own, conquering many barbarian tribes and killing multitudes, all without the aid of a mystical death mask, gets his ass handed to him by Conan, and would have died if not for his daughter summoning an army of sand warriors (?) to battle the Cimmerian. Making quick work of the dust folks, his daughter wounds Conan with a poison-tipped throwing blade to turn the tide of the battle in daddy's favor.
So Conan and his woman-shaped plot device jump off a cliff and are rescued by the convenient arrival of his pirate pals. At this point, I was expecting the characters to pay a visit to some new version of the original film's Wizard of the Mounds (played by the unforgettable Mako) in order to save the poisoned Conan's life. But no, Conan shrugs off the poisoning like a mosquito bite.
So was Rose McGowan not using a fatal poison? And if so, then why? What was the purpose of this? The object of the characters was to kill Conan, and if the villains had any sense of fair play, they wouldn't have summoned magical creatures to fight in their stead. So why draw the line at fatal poisoning? This doesn't make any sense.
But this is for the best, I suppose, because this film hasn't set up any characters who care for Conan the way Subotai and Valeria did in the original film. Valeria was willing to brave demons to save the life of her beloved, putting her own soul in jeopardy in order to bring Conan back from beyond the veil of death. Tamara, on the other hand, never really gives two shits about her Conan.
Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Conan and Tamara hide out in a cave and bump uglies, and we're treated to a glimpse of the breasts of Rachel Nicols' body double (BOO!), then she inexplicably decides to leave her sleeping Cimmerian, wandering off into the forest for NO FUCKING REASON.
It's not like the threat is over. She knows that the bad guys are frantically searching for her. So she abandons the only person who can protect her to wander aimlessly in the fucking woods until she inevitably gets caught. What the fuck?! If any creative party involved in this film had two brain cells to rub together, they could have at least come up with a short fight sequence where Conan and Tamara are trapped in the cave by Stephen Lang's goons, and Conan could be overwhelmed and left for dead while Tamara is dragged away to her doom.
At least that would have made some fucking sense. But this movie doesn't have time for making sense.
Conan enlists the help of that Iraqi guy who tortured Marky Mark in Three Kings to help him get into Stephen Lang's fortress, he fights a tentacled monstrosity, then catches up to Stephen Lang as he performs the ritual of the... mask... bloodening.
Basically, he delivers a small cut to Tamara's torso, lets the blood pool in the mask, which sucks it all up with a built-in asshole. I'm not exaggerating. This mask has a blood-drinking asshole.
The ritual complete, Stephen Lang dons the mask, which kind of wriggles on his face, then declares himself the God of Tentacle Porn, commanding his enemy Conan to eat a bowl of fuck. Now that he wears the fabled mask of necromancer bones, surely Stephen Lang is invincible, no? He claims that with the power of the mask, he can resurrect his dead witch wife in the body of Tamara, and together they will RULE THE WORLD!!!
Oddly enough, he fails at even this, the most simple of tasks for a necromancer (am I right, D&D nerds?!), and his skills as a swordsman are not augmented by his new-found god-like power, either. Conan still kicks his ass.
Rose McGowan, who is supposed to be a powerful sorceress, even summoning those sand monsters I mentioned earlier, apparently forgets she has magical powers, instead relying on her ye olde Freddy Kruger slasher glove to deal with Tamara. This does not end well, as she falls to her death, impaling herself on a big stick. Stephen Lang stumbles upon his incestuous daughter's corpse, and being a complete failure, can't resurrect her with his necromantic deity powers, either.
He duels with Conan for a few minutes before he is thrown into a river of lava, confronted with the knowledge in his final moments that for all his drooling, snarling bravado, his entire life was a pointless waste and that he fundamentally sucked as a warlord and a demi-god.
Conan and Tamara part ways, because not even sex could keep these two crazy kids together, and thank fucking Crom, the movie ends.
There's nothing to recommend, here. Well, maybe Rose McGowan.
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| Her greatest performance. |
Perhaps I'm biased. I've had a crush on Rose McGowan since I saw her in The Doom Generation when I was 13 years old. All of her... shit, I'm creeping myself out. Moving on!
Marcus Nispel, whose remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre I actually enjoy, directed a terrible, terrible motion picture. There's nothing big in this movie. And I'm not talking about big locations, or big special effects. I'm talking about that ephermeral BIG feeling you get when you discover something iconic. You look at it and say "that's pretty fucking cool". BIG.
The original Conan The Barbarian has plenty of BIG:
Conan's trials on the Wheel Of Pain. The discovery of the Alantean tomb. Being crucified on the Tree Of Woe, and subsequently killing a buzzard with his teeth before succumbing to exhaustion (a true badass moment if ever there was one). His harrowing resurrection, being overwhelmed by demons before his trusted companions Subotai and Valeria drive them away to restore Conan's soul to his body. Thulsa Doom transforming into a giant serpent at a cannibalistic orgy. The Battle of the Mounds. Conan's final stand-off with Thulsa Doom, which didn't end with a titanic battle, but with a brutal execution. The Riddle of Steel.
All set to the pounding, epic score by Basil Poledouris. Fucking BIG.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing BIG about this pathetic remake. And so much of it can be blamed on its antagonist. Stephen Lang, who is generally a good actor, revels in the big, over-the-top villainy he perfected with his ludicrously cartoonish role in the mediocre Avatar, trying so hard to appear menacing and dangerous, when he is anything but. He snarls, spit drips from his curled lips, he yells and bellows, but he never feels like a convincing threat.
Compare this with James Earl Jones and his iconic portayal of Thulsa Doom in the original film. He doesn't appear imposing at first glance, and that's the true threat. He's a suave, soft spoken, seductive creature who can convince a woman to jump to her death with a mere gesture. He's the serpent in the Garden of Eden, a truly dangerous adversary not because of his skill with a sword, but because of his skill with words, his hypnotic stare, and his disturbing understanding of human nature. And that's what makes his downfall so powerful.
Doom tries to soothe Conan the way he soothes his masses, placating the single-minded warrior with the words that have brought so many under his sway. But Conan represents the indomitable human will, and does not fall prey to his enemy's seductive speech. No, he decapitates Thulsa Doom and throws his severed head down a flight of stairs, to land at the feet of his adoring throngs.
Seeing the death of their god, the spell of his power seemingly broken, instead of rising up to avenge their fallen leader, the people simply disperse, leaving this shattered fantasy behind to rebuild their lives. It's a truly powerful climax, so much more fulfilling than just another well-choreographed sword fight. It's also a testament to the genius of director John Milius, who understood how to make a fucking Conan movie.
Nobody involved in this misguided movie knew how to make a fucking Conan movie. My cousin and I were forced to see this in 3D because our local cinema did not provide a 2D screening.
Here's a spoiler alert: the fucking movie isn't in 3D. Once you get past the Morgan Freeman-narrated prologue, the movie is as flat as Gwen Stefani until the end credits roll. What a fucking joke.
And speaking of Morgan Freeman, why didn't he pop up at the end to deliver any narration? Was he too busy to record an extra three lines in the sound booth? I suppose that's all for the best, considering he had no business narrating a Conan movie in the first place. His soothing voice is just so out of place in this kind of story. Mako's narration, with his gravelly, weathered voice, fit the subject matter perfectly.
Every time Morgan Freeman chimed in to fill me on Conan's tween years, I kept expecting him to start talking about his pal Andy Dufresne. At the end of the film, I half-expected him to pop up to tell the audience about Conan's long and perilous journey to Zihuatanejo, where he follows his dream of becoming the first Cimmerian beach bum.
At least that would have been amusing, which is more than I can about anything that really happened with the movie I now refuse to call Conan The Barbarian.
Dammit, I just called it by the title I refused to use. You know what, it would be best if I just stopped talking about this movie right now, before my blood pressure rises to dangerous levels.
Because I really care.
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| The only Conan you'll ever need. |
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