Chapter Two: Highlander II
By Brett Ballard-Beach
August 4, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Big Country: You have a Highlander poster in a tube in the back of your closet.
Soft Cell: You mouth the words when you watch Highlander.
A-ha: You own a VCR with a copy of Highlander stuck in it.
(Brief apologies in advance: Although I did promise it at the end of my last column, there will be no Quickening this week. There will, however, be Highlander II. And if that sounds confusing to read, it’s been equally confusing for me to wrap my brain around. Tumble on in further at your own risk.)
Considering the film I had already chosen for this installment of Chapter Two, I deem it fortuitous that I stumbled across Peck’s column last week while checking out a link to a humor piece written by Jesse Eisenberg that a friend had forwarded me. I spent the better part of an hour reading this and two similar columns pertaining to classic rock bands, laughing harder than I have in at least 10 years, to the point of a riverful of tears streaming out of my eyes, and my throat spasming (when I go in on excessive laughter, I go all in.) My personal favorite was
Steely Dan: You have snorted cocaine off a copy of Remembrance of Things Past.
I found the three Highlander references humorous, even though I had a limited frame of reference for them, because the film, released in the US in the spring of 1986, had always given off the vibe as being very much of the mid-1980s, as tied to those few years as the bands Peck references, and as a textbook example of the cinema created by the first wave of music video directors turned feature film directors (in this case, Russell Mulcahy.)
Mulcahy helmed the first ever music video to air on MTV, as well as nearly all of the videos that made Duran Duran who they were visually, and most of Elton John’s ‘80s video output. He ran the artist gamut from XTC to Taylor Dayne, with stops in between for Falco, Billy Joel and Def Leppard. Prior to this weekend, I had seen exactly two of his films, the lurid and stylish and largely forgotten Denzel Washington cop thriller Ricochet, and the would-be franchise launcher The Shadow, notorious - at least for me - as one of the few films boring enough to make me seriously consider dozing off in the theater.
I was well aware of the cult surrounding the first two Highlander films, and in particular the infamy surrounding Highlander 2: The Quickening but never felt an overriding need to dive in, particularly since there seemed to be a clutter of director’s cuts, international cuts, extended versions, and Special Edition DVDs to wade through. My discussion of both films that follows is based upon the 116 min director’s cut of Highlander as distributed by Anchor Bay in 2002, and the 2004 special edition of Highlander II (no subtitle and with Roman numerals) released by Lionsgate Home Video and clocking in at 109 mins. Although I hoped to see The Quickening in all its critically drubbed glory, I was not able to secure a copy of the 91 minute version released in the United States in early 1991.
There are a lot of similarities between the first two Highlanders - director, producers, acting leads, screenwriter (well, one of the three from Highlander anyway) - but what is missing from former to latter, in a word, is Queen. Or rather what Queen brought to the first movie by providing six original songs and a good chunk of the score. There was no official soundtrack released, but the band’s 1986 album A Kind of Magic gathers most of what appeared in the film into one place. I became familiar with the title track and a few other songs after buying the 1992 compilation Classic Queen upon its initial release.
Although I listened to those songs any number of times, it wasn’t until watching the film that I truly grasped how directly they were inspired by dialogue, plot, and/or feelings of the characters in the film. As fitted as they were to be placed within the film, they have a transformative effect, aided and abetted by Mulcahy’s background, that renders the film like a feature length music video/rock opera inspired by a set of Queen songs. Did Freddie Mercury’s porn ‘stache come before Christopher Lambert’s incredulous smirk or vice/versa?
It is equally hard for me not to consider Highlander in the light of the other 1980s sci-fi film for which Queen provided the soundtrack (that would be Flash “A-ah” Gordon.) In the case of the latter, most of their music was instrumental, but the mix of an overly theatrical and oft-times campy rock band, with what proved to be intentional camp of the highest order was stylistically irresistible. Both films, I would argue, are best appreciated by stepping back into the mindset of a hyperactive 10-year-old boy. In the case of Highlander, add to that description that it is the adolescent’s first R-rated film.
The opening 20 minutes of Highlander contain pretty much all the elements that will be mixed and matched and returned to over the course of the 90 minutes that follow. In near succession, there is: an opening scrawl read in voiceover by the purring Scottish brogue of Sean Connery; opening credits backed by the first of the Queen songs; a wrestling match at Madison Square Garden during which our hero Connor MacLeod has the first of several flashbacks to the mid-1500s Scottish Highlands; and an amped and pumped sword fight in an underground parking garage in which the loser gets his head offed and the winner presides over a spectacle of lightning and fury that ends with everything in sight that could possibly shatter and explode doing so.
Visually, Highlander is stunning, stacked with pretty much every music video cliché one could hope for, at almost the exact point in time when those attributes became clichés. If you simply focus on the plot in 10 minute chunks and allow yourself localized amnesia (or simply that 10 year-old-boy’s ADHD), the film delivers. The soundtrack by Queen helps bring home the soaring romanticism the film strives to deliver and actually helps sell it as much as a love story as a sword & sorcery/sci-fi/costume drama mash-up. It doesn’t surprise me that the scribe of the Twilight series, Melissa Rosenberg, and the director of the last three Fast & Furious flicks, Justin Lin, is working on a reboot. The results of such collaboration are not entirely unintriguing to my pop-culture riddled soul.
The film is loaded with plot, and actually very light on exposition, so that any “nagging questions” such as: “Are all immortals highlanders?” “Why is there no eruption of blood when a head gets lopped off?” and “Why bother focusing on a police investigation of the ‘epidemic of beheadings'?" are quickly steamrolled over. I realize some of these questions may be answered in other films, in novelizations, on TV, or in video games, but for the purpose of the singular, contained original film, it’s quite breathtaking how the origin story actually seems to be either: a) the Cliff Notes of the origin story or b) the lead-up to the origin story. As many aspects of the narrative as there are that raise questions a sequel might conceivably answer, the end of Highlander more or less lays such a notion to rest. Whence forth Highlander II?
As revealed in the 2004 documentary “Seduced by Argentina” (available as an extra on the DVD), there was not much thought initially given to there being a sequel. But then the fans began to ask those nagging questions and the money people began to wonder “what if." And, well, it HAD been a “hit” overseas, although it barely made its $16 million budget back with worldwide grosses when all was said and done. It died a quick theatrical death after being abandoned by distributor 20th Century Fox in the States, but went on to become a high seller and rental on video.
Screenwriter Peter Bellwood was tasked with writing his way out of the corner the first Highlander had stranded itself in. The result, at least in the United States in November 1991, was Highlander 2: The Quickening. For all the dreadful reviews it received, it remains the highest grossing of the four theatrical films (to date) with $15 million in domestic dollars. It grossed more than twice what the first one had, but its budget was also slightly more than doubled.
But I was not able to view that version and instead of experiencing a film so awesomely bad, Roger Ebert expected it would be held up for ridicule for decades to come, I saw the version that its co-producer Peter Davis touts as the best possible version that he and fans could ask for. “Seduced by Argentina” makes it clear that a host of factors - from shooting in a country unknown to the cast and crew, to the cost of building most sets from scratch, to a currency that went through such constant fluctuations it made it impossible to know from one day to the next how much money there actually was - kept tensions fraught from the start and ultimately resulted in the bond company seizing the film back, with the goal of releasing any version of the film that might recoup their investment. Mulcahy and the producers were effectively banned from their own production
A “Renegade Version” running about 18 minutes longer, made with Mulcahy’s cooperation and featuring an entire new scene shot nearly four years later, came out in the late 1990s. The Special Edition that I viewed is essentially that, but with all the special and visual effects tweaked, or improved using the new technology that became available in the interim.
All the emphasis on technology, alas, cannot disguise the fact that Highlander II is even more of a mess from a storytelling standpoint than its forbear. The story incorporates everything from corporate greed to an earth in ecological crisis and from environmental terrorists to explosions (er, quickenings) that seemingly level entire city blocks. When the highlight of a film is the impression that one particular scene sets a film record for the most shattered glass ever, perhaps it’s better to focus on what the actors bring to their parts...
...which would be the case if the actors actually had characters to embody, and if their performances were notable for the right reasons. Christopher Lambert’s attempt at portraying the broken-down and aged MacLeod in the film’s opening third plays like his misbegotten tribute to Brando’s Don Vito Corleone. Lambert mumbles and shuffles and sighs at the heavens and confuses being a character with playing a character. When he is restored to his youth (and immortal status), Lambert indulges his repertoire of smirks to no end.
Virginia Madsen, as the terrorist who uncovers a shocking truth about the state of the planet, strikes interesting notes for a few scenes. These all go out the window when, within five minutes of meeting MacLeod for the first time, they engage in the most unmotivated cinematic kamikaze fuck I have ever dropped my jaw to (and yes, I am considering the equally loony Jean-Claude Van Damme/Natasha Henstridge sink coupling in Maximum Risk when I make that bold statement).
I am a big fan of the intense cheesiness that Michael Ironside can bring to a role that calls for it, but he flails playing the perversely masochistic General Katana. Compared to the over-the-top-gusto that Clancy Brown brought to the villain in the first Highlander, Ironside’s is somehow too much but not enough. And Sean Connery? Sigh. Starring in the first film was fine as a prelude to his Oscar-winning role in The Untouchables, but here he’s in it for the paycheck and the script doesn’t even attempt to deny it. Two-thirds of his role consists of interrupting a performance of Hamlet, getting fitted for a new outfit, and flying in a plane from Scotland to the U.S., suggesting to his female companion that she sit on his face.
And for all the face-lifting and revising that have gone in to make Highlander II a more visually arresting experience, it still comes across as the prototypically grungy and bleak future dystopia, like a third-rate Xerox of Blade Runner. What’s notably disappointing is that for a few minutes at the beginning, Mulcahy seems primed to deliver something special. The camera circles around the interior of the opera house where MacLeod is in attendance and the soar of that uncut tracking shot is positively life affirming. But then the story kicks in, the first of many flashbacks commence, Lambert opens his mouth, and any “kind of magic” goes right out the window. I do find it an interesting observation that Highlander II includes opera, jazz, blues, a quick nod to Queen on a jukebox, even the unmistakable pipes of Lou Gramm for the closing credits tune, but that the musical hodgepodge in no way competes with an overdose of Freddie Mercury.
To return to that making of documentary one last time, my heart finds it hard to truly lash out at a film where the production crew speaks so fondly of their experience, even as they confirm what hell it was. None of them set out to make a bad movie: the costumer, the set designer, the cameraman, and the VFX creator. And, as reviled as it still seems to be two decades later, it led to two more films and video games and a television series that ran for six seasons. Just imagine what could have happened had it been any good.
Next time: Pop quiz. You are making a sequel to one of the great action films of the '90s and you want to mix things up. What do you do hotshot? What do you do? You set the action on a cruise ship of course.