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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.

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