Highlander is one of those movies that feels like it could only have been made in the 80s or early 90s. It’s not quite esoteric enough to be a 70s fantasy flick, and it lacks the polish and accompanying vapidity that tarnished so many Hollywood efforts in later decades.
It is memorable these days mainly for Christopher Lambert’s comical attempt at a Scottish accent as antihero Connor MacLeod, not to mention Sean Connery’s complete failure to even attempt pulling off a Spanish one as fellow immortal Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez. And of course there is Clancy Brown’s irresistibly gothic performance as baddie the Kurgan, a brutal behemoth who somehow appears to be at least 9ft tall on screen, even though the American actor himself is only 6ft 2in.
Nobody would call Russell Mulcahy’s film a good movie, but it is surely one of the greatest “so bad it’s good” films of all time. Nothing hangs together or really makes sense thematically. But the world of the immortals, from the baffling but tremendously exciting “quickening” to the very fact they have to chop each other’s heads off until only one remains, retain a gloriously undeniable comic book silliness.
As a small boy stealing priceless trashy VHS moments when mum and dad weren’t looking in the late 80s, this was the good stuff: violent, bombastic and fuelled by a scattershot approach to internal plausibility. The movie may not have had a shred of logic, but it had everything else.
All of which makes the news that John Wick director Chad Stahelski is working on a reboot something of a curate’s egg. On the one hand, modern Hollywood has the tools to smooth off those unfortunate 80s edges: on the other, the idea of a de-cheesed, perfectly coherent and thematically consistent take on Highlander is about as attractive as a bottle of 2012 Veuve Clicquot that has had all the alcohol removed.
Moreover, there are umpteen terrifying examples already in the bag as to why these kind of movies should never be allowed to get the remake treatment. Remember Hollywood’s attempts to bring Total Recall and RoboCop back to the multiplex? Both original movies were admittedly less unwieldy and clunky than Highlander, but there are parallels in the pervading sense of comic book burlesque.
The remakes were more polished and effective than the originals. The remakes probably featured better acting than the originals. The remakes had Colin Farrell and Joel Kinnaman – serious thesps these – while the originals had Arnold Schwarzenegger and Peter Weller, hardly perennial Oscars nominees. Yet everyone who has seen both films – the new and the old – will have left the screening for the remakes feeling as if every ounce of joy had been ruthlessly drained from their aching, bloodless bodies.
Stahelski, who hopes the new Highlander will be the start of a franchise, has already spotted the main issue with the 1986 original’s potential for sequels. “I think we have some very good elements now,” he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “The trick is when you have the tagline, ‘There can only be one’, you can’t just kill everybody the first time.” Instead, the first film will incorporate elements of the 1992 TV series. “We’re trying to do a bit of a prequel – a setup to the ‘gathering’ – so we have room to grow the property.”
It seems likely, then, that we’ll have to wait several movies to even find out who ends up the last man standing, which puts even more pressure on episode one to find other points of interests – a tough call when your entire franchise is basically about waiting to discover the identity of the last guy to not have their head chopped off.
Some advice from a long-term Highlander fan: don’t try to smooth off those weird edges. If we are to get new movies, make them even more batshit insane than the original. Refuse to follow the tried and test rules of Hollywood screenwriting in 2023, go way out on a limb instead, get crazy with the casting. And NEVER worry about the accents being off.
