BECKY OHLSEN (via e-mail, just after I'd seen a Wednesday preview screening of "Conan the Barbarian" in 3-D): ...all I really want to know is if there's a scene where [Conan] pushes a wheel around and around until he's huge.
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MY REPLY: There is not! Though young Conan does kill an entire scout party of Mohican-looking warriors who snarl like jaguars (literally -- they make what sound like foleyed jaguar sounds), all without breaking the bird's egg in his mouth. (Long story.)
The movie is pretty lousy, noisy, assaultive, muddily shot, straight-to-video trash -- but I would argue that's its sort of FUN straight-to-video trash, for a little while, because it's so hilariously violent. Imagine "Centurion" on a meth binge. The first scene is Conan the Fetus being cut out of his mother's womb by Ron Perlman during a battle, from the POV of the fetus, ghost-narrated by Morgan Freeman. Perlman then lifts the fake baby in the air and yells "GRAAA!"
But after a while the whole thing degrades, or maybe I just got numb, and it just starts feeling like everyone got bored and/or some Bulgarian pickpocket ran off with a bag full of the budget -- so the last half just sort of feels like a generic, hard-to-follow knockoff you could rent at Blockbuster in the '90s, or maybe it feels like one of those sub-par "Xena" TV knockoffs, only with no sense of humor.
It also drove me nuts that Jason Momoa and Rachel Nichols have no vocal presence; they both sound like they work at a surf shop in Malibu.
Still, I can only get so mad at a movie that features [spoilers]
- Stephen Lang wearing a crown that is essentially an Alien facehugger;
- People making actual animal noises for no reason;
- A guy's head being disolved by molten steel in a sword-forge;
- Hilarious amounts of dismemberment and other gratuity (seriously, EVERY OTHER SHOT in this movie is of people in chains being whipped by sadists; it's like 70 percent of the population of Cimmeria was enslaved at any given moment, everywhere);
- A scene where Conan cuts off a guy's nose and then, 10 years later, basically sticks his whole hand in the nose-hole to make him talk;
- The villains riding around on a land-ship carried by a team of elephants;
- Morgan Freeman talking about the time "before the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the Sons of Areus."
But yeah, the movie's total crap.
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