Fridae

John Milius and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s vision of Robert E Howard’s creation Conan the Barbarian remains one of this reviewer’s favourite fantasy films. With Basil Poledouris’ epic score, beautiful location shooting in the Almerian desert, and the Governator’s physicality, it was a poetry written in blood with a point: a force-of-nature anti-hero shaking the hypocrisies of civilisation to their knees. By comparison, this year’s reboot of Conan the Barbarian is for its epic size and budget, a film suffering from a tremendous lack of actual storytelling ambition. It’s a movie that does little more than wanting to deliver an orgy of bloody violence to its viewership, throwing plot and character development to the side.

The barest bones of a heroic quest are there, of course. Conan of Cimmeria is born literally on the battlefield and delivered by Dagger Caesarean thanks to his father Corin (Ron Perlman), who raises him skyward with a cry of his whole soul. Years later, he is a tough, agile youth (Leo Howard) who witnesses the devastation of his tribe at the hands of the warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) and his sorceress daughter Marique (Ivana Staneva as a girl; Rose McGowan as a woman) and has since sworn vengeance. Zym it turns out is looking for a powerful mask that can only be activated by a pureblood of the line of the now-lost evil empire of Acheron, of which Conan’s tribe happens to have a piece. The completed mask will resurrect his late sorceress wife from the grave, and allow him to rule the world.

Soon as a strapping adult (Jason Momoa, Game of Thrones), Conan and his best bud Artus (Nonso Anozie, Brighton Rock) roam the Hyborean world doing heroic tasks like freeing slaves and bedding the female ones afterwards. Soon he gets wind that Zym is stronger than ever and is about to find his pureblood, Tamara (Rachel Nichols), a novitiate at some vaguely Greco-Roman monastery where the abbot appears to be an ageing hippy, novitiates are all attractive young women who do taichi all day long, and monks all seem to be Asian men. Something seems very wrong here.

By this point, and it gets no better for the rest of the film, the story seems to be constructed as a series of various setpieces interspersed with just the right amount of exposition to carry the story forward. Titles onscreen announce location changes. Plot points are raised and not followed upon, setups never reach their payoffs. Fight scenes seem to resemble the lees of far superior films, the bulk of them shot in annoying medium to close up shots to the extent that you can’t tell who’s parrying and who’s thrusting. A needlessly complicated fight scene involving loincloth-clad sand zombies throwing knives at Conan is so gimmicky it’s groanworthy. There is little poetry and wit, everywhere in this fantasy world looks pretty much like everywhere else, and soon you’re just not bothering to keep track either. If only the grave, stentorian narration provided by a Morgan Freeman soundalike (maybe it is Freeman) could have continued throughout the film instead of ending quite early as it did here. Director Marcus Nispel seems to have watched a ton of movies and references everything from Tsui Hark’s brilliant Seven Swords to Terry Gilliam’s even more brilliant Time Bandits, but has hardly learnt any of the lessons about storytelling and what makes great adventure.

His final product resembles a video game more than a movie proper, where plot and the barest form of sense are jettisoned in favour of continuous bloody, tasteless violence.