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Genre
Sword & Sorcery
Length
101 minutes
Director
Richard Fleischer
Major Stars
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Grace Jones
Wilt Chamberlain
MPAA Rating
PG
Year Released
1984
Review Posted on
8/8/2006
Rating
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Review by Richard Scheib
Conan the Barbarian (1982), an adaptation of Robert E. Howard's primal character, was a big success when it came out - indeed it made a star out of body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first lead acting role. That success mandated this sequel. Schwarzenegger, Mako who played the sorcerer in the first film, and producer Dino de Laurentiis are back, although this film is without either director John Milius or screenwriter Oliver Stone.
The new director was Richard Fleischer. Fleischer had made some simply great genre films - Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Fantastic Voyage (1966) - but by the 1980s was working as a glorified B-movie hack, turning out efforts like this, Amityville 3D (1983) and the subsequent Robert E. Howard adaptation Red Sonja (1985) for Dino de Laurentiis.
On script Milius and Stone have been replaced by Stanley Mann, author of The Collector (1965) and Eye of the Needle (1981) and more tellingly of the likes of Damien: Omen II (1978) and Meteor (1979). More hopefully there is a story from Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas - Thomas had written a number of issues of Marvel's various Conan comic books in the 1970s and Conway had worked on Marvel's adaptations of Howard's King Kull character. Unfortunately in employing comic-book writers and then handing the screenplay over to a hack like Mann they deliver a story that turns Conan into... well... a comic-book character.
The story is only a pedestrian reshuffling of typical genre trappings - witches, demons etc - that feels like a D&D adventure with the cast merely moving in a straight-line from one encounter to the next.
Despite what the film's vandalistic title suggests, Conan has been severely watered down. All the primal violence of Milius's vision in the first film has been replaced by a two-dimensional comic-book tone. Indeed this Conan film received a PG rather than an R-rating, like the original. All the primality and brutality that essentially is Conan has been sacrificed. And in Schwarenegger's performance, which has yet to develop the tongue-in-cheek audience rapport it would with later action film stardom, Conan is a dumb brute whose intelligence seems down around the single-digit level.
The rest of the characters fare little better - there are some awfully mawkish scenes regarding the princess's sexual awakening and infatuation with Conan. Both Tracey Walter and Mako give embarrassing performances. The one good aspect of the film is the presence of avant garde singer Grace Jones in one of the handful of film appearances she made in the mid-80s. Grace isn't a particularly good actress, but whenever she is on screen projects a raw savagery - she is like a wild animal that needs to be caged. Although the filmmakers, as though seemingly somewhat daunted by such a strong female presence, have to dumb her down with a really sexist scene where she screams at the sight of a mouse.
That said, the movie, if approached with the right attitude, can be fun. But it's fun in the way Chuck E. Cheese is fun. LIght fdare, easily chewed and swallowed, but ultimately short of nutrients.p:/
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