Conan The Barbarian didn't make much of a splash when it came out. It was critically panned and flopped at the box office, so why now should I revisit it? I used to post on CBM pretty frequently, but a combination of life getting much busier, and the sheer stupidity of some users on this site, kept me away for a while. So why return to review a film like Conan?
To start off, I'm a Conan fan. Not a huge fan by any means, but I like the original Conan film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and I've read a few of the original Robert E. Howard stories. I always hoped the big Cimmerian would get a big screen return so I followed the development of this one closely. My expectations lowered considerably when schlock-master Marcus Nispel signed on to direct. If you aren't familiar with Nispel's work, he was behind two mediocre horror remakes (Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and one mediocre Viking film, Pathfinder, starring Carl Urban (ten bucks to anyone who actually remembers that movie). My expectations for Conan kept dropping with the casting news. I wasn't too familiar with Jason Momoa, but he looked the part. All I could do was go "meh" as Rachel Nichols and Rose McGowan got cast. I was impressed that Stephen Lang signed on as the villain, seeing how he was hot at the time after giving acclaimed performances in Public Enemies and Avatar, and I was happy to see the always awesome Ron Perlman join the cast (Perlman has long been associated with Conan, voicing him in a video and an animated film that sadly was never released).
The production stills hit, and I was less than impressed with how lifeless and boring they made the film look. Then the trailer hit. The trailer was about the most bland, basic, boring trailer you could imagine. After it was all said and done, I did not rush out to see the film when it hit theaters in August 2011. Eventually I got a bootleg of the film from a friend and meant to watch it, but forgot about it as it sat there on my DVD shelf.
But last night I found myself browsing Netflix, bored. I had a bootleg of Beast of the Southern Wild and intended to watch that, but I was tired and decided to put on something that required no brain power. I saw that Conan The Barbarian was on instant and decided to put it on, figuring I would fall asleep anyway.
The film was so bad I couldn't fall asleep. It wasn't just that it was bad that appalled me, because I'm used to bad CBM's, but it was the obvious sexism of the film, which I'll get to in a bit.
In a nutshell, this film tells the story of Conan, who is out to avenge the death of his father (Ron Perlman), who was killed by the warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang). Zym is trying to assemble some magic mask that will allow him to resurrect his dead wife, and somehow he also wants to use the mask to- you guessed it- take over the world. For some reason, Zym needs to sacrifice a "pure-bloold" in order to get the mask to work, and Tamara (Rachel Nichols) is apparently the only pure-blood left.
Where do I start with how bad this is? First off, there's the plot itself. While I wasn't expecting Shakespeare, I was still surprised by how poorly executed and full of holes it is. I would expect to see something like this on SyFy Channel, not a major Hollywood picture. If Zym was doing this all to bring back his dead wife, it would have made his character at least somewhat interesting, but the dead wife thing is more or less an afterthought (and explained in an awkward and cheesy monologue). A contrite plot was a bad start, and the rest of the film just falls apart as well.
Despite being action from beginning to end, it isn't terribly exciting. The fight scenes are some of the most bland and boring since Sucker Punch as they are all the same: Conan fights a bunch of guys, kills guys, moves on. And that's the other big problem: We never fear for Conan. Everything seems so easy for him and we never doubt that he'll kill the bad guys and save the day, and Jason Momoa's performance didn't help. While Momoa perfectly captured Conan's arrogance, he overdid it at points. He never shows doubt or fear or anything to show that Conan is human. I will give props to the casting department for making sure that there's no one on the film with a better physique than Momoa, but once again, it makes it clear that no one in the film is a physical challenge for him.
The other performances in the film aren't much better. Ron Perlman, usually reliable, just seems to be waiting for his paycheck to clear. Rachel Nichols is as bland as ever as Tamara, but her performance wasn't the biggest problem I had with that character (more on that later). And there's the bad guys, Rose McGowan and Stephen Lang. Both actors ham it up to such an extreme degree that both villains lose any menace they had to begin with, but in the actors defense, they didn't have much to work with.
But the real reason I was so appalled at this film is the blatant sexism in it. Yes, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories were full of sexism seeing how they were nothing but glorified adolescent fantasies, but the original Conan The Barbarian did a good job of updating the stories. Valeria, the lead in the original, is a strong woman and Conan falls for her because of this. Early on in the 2011 film there's a scene where Conan and his allies free a bunch of slaves, and of course all the women are topless. The topless women stare at Conan with adoration wondering how they can thank him, and then giggle with delight when him and his men carry them off to have their way with them.
Then there's the character of Tamara, probably the worst female protagonist since Bella from Twilight. Conan meets Tamara saving her from Zym's men, and spends the rest of the movie saving her. When Conan first saves Tamara, he keeps her as a hostage, intending to use her to draw Zym into a trap. Of course, over the course of the film, Tamara falls for Conan, and he saves her from almost being captured several more times. In the most obvious third act twist, she gets captured by Zym AGAIN and Conan has to rescue her, leading to a fight between Tamara and the witch Marique, played by Rose McGowan. In this moment, I figured that Tamara would finally come into her own and save herself, but she spends the entire fight calling for Conan until he finally arrives and defeats Marique himself. The climax of the film has Tamara hanging over a pit of lava, the only thing saving her life is a length of chain wrapped around her wrists that Conan clings to as he faces off with Zym.
To reiterate that, the only thing saving a woman's life is the manacles being held at the other end by a strong man. Pretty eloquent metaphor there.
Now, being a comic book fan, you have to expect some sexism. Comics themselves are pretty sexist, and so are their fans. Things have improved somewhat nowadays, but not much. Just look at how skimpy the costumes are for most modern superheroines, though thankfully good writers can overcome this with good characterizations. Comic books have never been kind to females, even Wonder Woman, a feminist icon, spent most of her early days getting tied up in every way imaginable by men. Just look at the most recent debacle that happened on this site over Mary-Jane, where fans cried out because she wasn't a sexed up caricature like in the comic books (props to Mark Cassidy for attempting to call out fans on this, though sadly most people missed his message). Comic books are filled with damsels in distress needing rescued, but the movies usually do a good job of moving past this idea (except for Mary-Jane in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies).
I guess my point is that I expect better of modern comic book movies. We often wonder why we can get a good female lead comic movie going, and Conan is a great example why we can't. Women are objects in this film, prizes that men fight over. Its a misstep that the Red Sonja movie made, where Sonja always insisted that she didn't need a man's help, yet Arnold Schwarzenegger always popped up to save her. For the most part, the modern Marvel movies show that CBM's can have strong female characters, and the rest of Hollywood should look at them to see how it's done. Black Widow wouldn't be nearly as interesting to viewers if she was always calling on Captain America to save her.
But anyway, that's Conan the Barbarian. Its boring, contrived, and sexist. If you like bland fight scenes and weak helpless women, this is the movie for you. All we can do is hope that The Legend of Conana is an improvement or it will be a long time before we see our favorite Cimmerian hero flexing on screen again.