Folks, this is it.
We’ve reached the logical end of American cinema. It’s over, go home. Put on sackcloth and ashes and weep, for I have seen… Conan the Barbarian.
It’s bad. It’s so bad it’s ugly. It’s painful. While watching it, I was thinking about how much better COnan was - no, not the original Conan the Barbarian. No, not Conan O’Brian. I compared it unfavorably to Conan the Destroyer. Yes, the film made in one of Dino DeLaurentis’s worst periods, which he may have had to trick Schwarzanegger into doing. The new flick isn’t even that intriguingly bad. It’s just obnoxious.
First off, you may have seen the awesomely cool trailer which depicts Conan as a young boy. That scene is actually pretty good. Ron Pearlman rocks it all. Then… not so much.
First, Conan is an idiot killing machine. He just shows up and kills everything. That’s pretty much it. He never particularly uses his brains, and he makes few decisions other than, “Kill that guy before killing that other guy.” Not that there’s much opprunity for characterization, anyhow. The old Conan movie kept him as a very silent protagonist - you understood from watching him react what he was thinking. This one grunts a lot, but there isn’t anything for him to do except glower. Young Conan is actually a much more interesting character because he never talks. Grown-up Conan has whatever motivation comes to mind (apparently, he frees slaves, but why is never explained, and this goes nowhere). There’s actually the seed of character growth in the childhood shots, but it was completely abandoned.
Action: the action is a huge number of rapid-series shots which do very little to imply the chaos of combat and a lot to confuse to audience as to what, exactly is going on. In one memorably bad sequence, Conan just vanishes from the action for lengthy periods, only to randomly show up and kill someone again.
Plot/Scene: The plot direction is tediously bad. We have no way of linking sets to sets. The older Conan movie, there was a clear movement of the characters from area to area. We see them literally running across long grasslands or riding horses. Here, they just tend to vanish from one area and appear in another, or the action suddenly cuts from one location to the next where something happens for reasons we don’t understand and don’t care to. The locations are rarely linekd in any way, so we don’t understand if there’s a long journey or a short one. Nor are any fo the locations important. In fact, one long sections towards the end could have been entirely eliminated without in the leat affecting the plot, and it would have improved the movie drastically.
Heroes/“NPC’s”: This movie rushes its dialogue, and tends to have important conversations with a clanging and clashing of combat, that half the time I couldn’t understand the gialogue anyway. I literally have no idea what any single character was named aside from Conan himself. It’s not that I didn’t care (well, I didn’t, but besides that), but that I couldn’t hear. In any case, the movie seems almost ashamed of people talking unless they’re taunting each other and threatening death, so it only has a bare minimum anyway.
Villains: Honestly, these are the least interesting villains around. They’re gratuitously evil and ugly just because, but there’s nothing really interesting about them. The movie actually has them resort to two different macguffins, without really being clear on why either one is particularly bad given that both of them are notable for having failed before the movie events begin.
Conan’s quest involves killing some liutenants to the Big Bad, but again, they’re not interesting and not worth noting. The only amusing part is the, err… exotic methods he comes up with to dispatch them. But frankly, there’s not the slightest doubt that he will kill them all and it’s just tedious. They’re not the slightest threat to him.
The Big Bad we could almost see, but he just sucks. It’s hard to describe. I just kept wishing he’s shut up and die already. He (well, there’s a pair) just comes off as stupid.
Humanity: OK, a weird thing to talk about. But the old Conan movie understood that people are goofy. We do and say stupid things. Conan (Ah-nold) gets drunk and punches out a camel. People look on this event with shock and wonder and “Dude, WTF?” looks. This movie has none of it. It’s so much over-serious as drained of life. Nobody does anything fun or silly. No one is ever amazed by strange events. We have all kinds of random people who dont’ do anything, but nobody could be bothered to be amazed for five seconds.
Well, the movie does have one thing going for it: Boobies. Yup, it shows actual breasts.
