There are two kinds of B-movies. The first kind is lazy, uninspired crap with just enough sensory titillation to get the audience in the seats, but has nothing real to offer them after the lights dim. The other kind is the fun kind, the B-movies that have the charm and whit (sometimes unintended) to be enjoyable. Unfortunately, the remake of Conan The Barbarian is the former. It is a dumb, dirty dog of a film. It seems to serve no purpose than to deprive an unsuspecting public of it's hard earned money. The problems start before the credits do, with a maddening Lord Of The Rings style prologue that clarifies squat. The world of Conan simply isn't complicated enough to warrant a prologue. It just serves to further muddy an already confusing and dull film.
The plot concerns - I'm actually not entirely sure. I know that Conan (Jason Momoa) wants revenge on some guy for killing his father. According to IMDB, that guy is "Kohar Zym" (Stephen Lang), but the exposition is so bad in this film that I was unable to catch his name while watching the film, of any the names really. I'm sure that I'd have missed Conan's name if it weren't on the poster.
Anyway, Conan wants revenge and that's pretty much it. He has no point of view, no philosophy, nothing to set him apart from the villains. Conan has just as much personality as the henchmen he kills (and in one case, significantly less). At some point CoCo meets this monk-lady (Rachel Nichols) who has special blood or something. Conan doesn't care. He just knows that Zym wants her for some ritual, so Conan ties her up and uses her as bait. He mistreats her at every turn, calls her a harlot, and yet, she falls in love with him. Why? Because the screenplay gods hath foretold it!
Now, nobody goes to a Conan movie for the story (thank goodness), you're all wondering how the action was, right? I can report with absolute certainly that the action definitely involved swords. After that it gets hazy. Conan probably killed a lot of people, but I could barely see any of it through the impossible-to-follow editing (TM).
There was a battle with some sand monsters that looked promising, but it devolves into a confusing soup of hyper-edited tedium and confusion. I think Conan might have been poisoned, but I'm not sure. Anyway the film never mentions it again. The final showdown is particularly lazy. Did Conan just walk in to the evil stronghold without anyone noticing? Does Zym not have any sentries guarding his fortress? Was he forced to lay them off due to the bad economy?
There where exactly two things I liked. The first was Conans birth (ripped from the womb during battle!) The second was monk-lady's father, who is a pacifist until he meets the bad guy. I like it that this is a world where even the pacifists are blood-thirsty.
The screening I attended was in 3D. Only the 3D didn't work. The film kept throwing things at the camera but not once did I feel that anything was coming at me. All the 3D did was make the screen darker and harder to see. This may have lowered my opinion of the film, but rest assured, 2D could not have saved this film.
It's really sad because I remember the original Conan The Barbarian from 1982. That Conan was fond of quoting Genghis Khan and inserting blasphemies into his prayers. In short-he was a barbarian. He had a personality. Of course Conan (1982) was made by John Milius (he wrote Apocalypse Now), someone who half-believes Conan's caveman philosophy on war and death. Conan (2011) was directed by Marcus Nispel (the Friday the 13th remake) who seems to believe in remaking violent movies as unimaginatively as possible. This new Conan has no personality, either as a character or as a film. It didn't need to be intelligent, or tightly plotted, but it did need some pizazz.
Grade: D
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