BEFORE: I'm determined to catch up this holiday weekend, because the whole point in splitting the Brendan Gleeson movies was to put "Calvary" on Easter Sunday. I'm working Saturday so that doesn't help, but then I've got all day on Sunday, I can post twice if I need to.
Jason Momoa carries over from "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Conan the Barbarian" (1982) (Movie #1,623)
THE PLOT: A vengeful barbarian warrior sets off to get his revenge on the evil warlord who attacked his village and murdered his father when he was a boy.
AFTER: This is, of course, a reboot/remake of the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise, and honestly at first I didn't realize that Jason Momoa had been on the scene prior to playing Aquaman, but he did have some credits to his name before playing superheroes, I mean, sure, nobody just comes out of nowhere and gets into a DC movie. He was on that same career path as Dwayne Johnson, playing chiseled mythical warriors with superhuman strength, and that's a quick path to success, right? Except it took him a decade or so to get there, but it tracks.
God damn, but I've watched a lot of movies - so many that just finding out when I watched the original film from 1982 is a CHORE. My blog is no longer searchable, that's how many movies I've watched - if I search on "Conan" I'm more likely to get that documentary about Conan O'Brien, that's how many entries I've logged. Sure, there's a way, without scrolling through a document on my phone that's over 4,000 movies long, hoping to catch a glimpse of the correct film, but it's a matter of going back through the archives now, it's like trying to find a book that's hidden in a library. Can I possibly remember what year I really decided to focus on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies? No, of course not, I don't have that kind of brainspace, which of course is why I keep such copious notes. A search on "Conan the Barbarian" from my blog's main entry page (not the search function) does narrow the possibilities down to about 10, and OK, now I know it was in January of 2014, but should it really be that difficult to find? Either way, I was late to the Conan party, that's for sure, and now I'm done with the character.
Or am I? Marvel Comics must still have the rights, because they revived the character about three years ago in a comic book called "Savage Avengers", they made Conan comic books WAY back in the day and decided to pick it up again in 2019. Really, I think it was a case of some writer putting his dream team together, with Conan, Wolverine, Punisher, Elektra and Venom working together, just for shits and giggles, I guess. But this means that Conan is now an official part of the Marvel Universe, and an Avenger (of sorts) at that. Who can keep track of all the Avengers, since there have been several hundred by now, what with the New Avengers, the Mighty Avengers, the West Coast Avengers, the Great Lakes Avengers, and the Savage ones. (Marvel, please hire me, I can keep track for you...). I'd seen Conan's enemy Kulan Gath used as a Spider-Man villain before, but Conan wasn't really part of the M.U. until just five years ago.
(In volume 2, Conan teamed up with Black Knight, Cloak and Dagger, Deathlok, Elektra/Daredevil and Weapon H, and they all went into the future, to the year 2099, before Conan ended up back in the Hyborian Age, where he belonged. It all got rather silly there before the comic got cancelled.)
But that's neither here nor there, I'm here to talk about the film, which is so very by-the-numbers, from the training of Conan as a young boy to watching his father get killed by Khalar Zym, who went around to all the barbarian tribes to collect the pieces of the ancient Mask of Acheron that would grant him ultimate power over life and death. Why? So he can bring back his dead wife Maliva, who was an evil sorceress and thus conquer Hyboria. But this takes an awful long time, because Khalar Zym and his daughter Marique, have to find a "pureblood" woman to serve as a vessel for Maliva's returning soul, and also to use her blood to bind the mask pieces together.
It's a good thing that this took so long, because Conan was allowed to grow up big and strong, and he was fairly content to just ride around the country side, freeing slaves and topless women from their oppressors, but then he saw the man with no nose, and was reminded of his mission, to find the evil warlord who killed his father and get his revenge. To do this, he allows himself to be captured and taken to prison, where the man with no nose is the Captain of the Guard. Oh, you guys are so asking for it, because Conan's in your prison now, and he's got you right where he wants you. A couple fights with the guards, your standard prison riot, and soon Conan is torturing the man with no nose to find out everything he needs to know about Khalar Zym.
Conan finds the pureblood woman, Tamara, who escaped from the monastery just in time, and then he starts working his way up the chain by capturing Zym's right-hand man, Remo. The first attempt to take down Zym fails, but fortunately Conan's band of pirates arrive just in time to whisk him and Tamara away, so they can try again. Here's where Conan could just escape with Tamara and go far away, which would be a way to defeat the villain, but no, it's just not that kind of movie. Tamara gets captured by Zym's forces, and they use her blood to fix the mask and then start the process of transferring Zym's dead wife's soul into her body, of course.
The last half hour, honestly I had no idea what was going on. Maybe I dozed off a few times, but that's not a good sign for an action movie. Anyway I rewound back to the start of the final battle and I tried again, concentrated very hard, and nope, I still have no idea what was happening. The finer details of that whole final sequence escaped me, even when I was paying close attention. Oh well, I can always read about it on Wikipedia to see what went down. The good guy won and defeated the evil power, right? Yeah, I thought so - and somehow there were a lot of tentacles involved, and people falling into chasms, as they tend to do. OK, moving on.
This film did poorly at the box office, so there was no interest in making a sequel to the reboot. There was talk of bringing back Schwarzenegger to the franchise at some point, and showing Conan's adventures when he was older, but those plans fell through in 2017, apparently.
Also starring Stephen Lang (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Rachel Nichols (last seen in "The Amityville Horror"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), Rose McGowan (last seen in "Scream"), Bob Sapp (last seen in "The Longest Yard"), Leo Howard (last seen in "Shorts"), Steven O'Donnell (last seen in "Breathe"), Nonso Anozie (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Raad Rawi (last seen in "The Devil's Double"), Laila Rouass (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Said Taghmaoui (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Milton Welsh (last seen in "Aeon Flux"), Nathan Jones (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Diana Lyubenova, Ioan Karamfilov, Ivana Staneva, Anton Trendafilov (last seen in "The Way Back"), Gisella Marengo (last seen in "Third Person"), Yoana Petrova, Vladimir Vladimirov, Katarzyna Wolejnio, Mark Amos (last seen in "Django Unchained"), Raw Leiba and the voice of Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Just Getting Started").
RATING: 5 out of 10 razor-sharp finger-claws
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