Highlander II: The Quickening
(1991)
(SPOILERS) I saw Highlander
II: The Quickening at the cinema. Yes, I actually paid money to see one of
the worst mainstream sequels ever on the big screen. I didn’t bother
investigating the Director’s Cut until now, since the movie struck me as
entirely unsalvageable. I was sufficiently disenchanted with all things Highlander that I skipped the TV series
and slipshod sequels, eventually catching Christopher Lambert’s last appearance
as Connor MacLeod in Highlander: End Game
by accident rather than design. But Highlander
II’s on YouTube, and the quality is decent, so maybe the Director’s Cut
improve matters and is worth a reappraisal? Not really. It’s still a
fundamentally, mystifyingly botched retcon enabling the further adventures of
MacLeod, just not quite as transparently shredded in the editing room.
In a way, that’s good, as there can be no real defence that
the fault lies elsewhere. What was Russell Mulcahy thinking? What was anyone
thinking? The screenplay is credited to Peter Bellwood (co-writer of the
original) from a story by Brian Clemens (yes, The Avengers Brian Clemens) and William N Panzer (a veritable career
of subsequent Highlanding), but the ins and outs of who decided what when seem
to be dependent on who you asked at what point. It’s been said the revelation
that the Immortals are aliens was a means to get Sean Connery (one time dead
Ramirez) back on board, whom Lambert had enjoyed working with on the original.
Alternatively, Ramirez wasn’t originally in the film, and Lambert threatened to
back out if Sean wasn’t included.
Then there’s the interference of the completion bond
company, who took over the film during editing, and wrangling with producers
who demanded the addition of elements they thought would make money. It’s been suggested
they introduced the planet Zeist element, although this was in the original
script. Some of this sounds a lot like passing the buck. Certainly, the major
change to the Director’s Cut is excision of references to Zeist, in an attempt
to mash together some continuity with the subsequent series. It’s a gesture
that entirely flounders. I have to admit, apart from the reference to being
sent to the future, it passed me by that they were now intended to come from
Earth’s past. Connor and Ramirez being sent through the mists of time makes no
more sense than being sent from another planet.
The latter whiffs strongly of looking to Superman for inspiration, both of
Highlander as Supes and his various opponents (the Kurgan, Katana) as Zod and
his cronies, and of the superpowers imbued on the otherwise mortal beings once in
the Earth’s environment. The conception of the sequel goes so wrong on so many
levels, but primarily the problem is “How do you continue a complete story?”
Somehow Connor has to be made immortal again, which requires negating
everything he achieved (including happiness, so Brenda is killed off in a
perfunctory flashback with a different actress). By revealing the origins of
the Immortals the makers also fall into the trap of diminishing the most
fascinating element of a good movie mythology; what you don’t know and are able
to speculate on is always more evocative (see also Alien/Prometheus, the Star Wars prequels).
Additionally, one of the most attractive elements of the
original was the traveller through time element, the protagonist alone and unchanging
through the ages. Now the flashbacks are mostly about Zeist or the intervening
years until 2024. Not nearly so engrossing. There’s a general overtone of
bashing together random elements regardless of whether they worked, simply
because they suited someone’s whims.
So Mulcahy wanted to make his Blade Runner (even though that ship had
sailed almost a decade ago), but ended up falling foul of a country (Argentina)
where it was hoped the extravagant scope could be achieved on the cheap.
Suddenly MacLeod’s an inventor who can rig up a device to save us from the
absented Ozone layer because it was considered a good idea to shoehorn in a
commentary on one of the big issues of the day (had no one seen Superman IV?)
Louise Marcus: Okay now, let me get this straight. You’re
mortal there, but you’re immortal here, until you kill all the guys from there
who come here and then you become mortal here. Unless you go there, or some
more guys from there come here, in which case you become immortal here, again.
Connor MacLeod: Something like that.
Inevitably, the picture (even in original release form)
spends a lot of time setting up this new world and retconned history, but then
has nothing worthwhile to do with it. There’s no attempt to explain how adult
Connor ended up with a Scottish tribe (evidently he’s no longer born into it),
but that’s peanuts in the scheme of the nonsense on display. The Zeist/past is
a means to bring Ramirez back for an extended cameo ($3.5m to Sean and a sexual
harassment suit to boot) and introduce a villain/villains (Michael Ironside’s
General Katana), but the plot amounts to little more than Connor proving the
Ozone layer shield he set up is no longer needed.
Sure, there’s some (so
subtle) commentary on corporate greed (John C McGinley wants to carry on
charging for the shield’s use; couldn’t Connor just design it with an off
switch?), but nothing happens for good reason, such that at points it has to
resort to commenting on its own stupidity as a kind of double bluff (“He’s an old man now. He’ll be dead in a
couple of years” one of Katana’s idiot henchman advises, entirely
logically).
Doctor Who’s
current showrunner Steven Moffat really ought to be one of the few who adores Highlander II; it makes even less sense
than his constant retcons and
spuriously reasoned catalogues of plot elements. His predecessor introduced the
very Highlander standing up
regeneration (just with slightly less orgasmic overtones, surprising really
given how keen on innuendo the show has become), of course.
The Quickening
takes in a ragbag of elements including Mulcahy’s Wild Boys video, Back to the
Future Part II (coincidence, apparently, and there’s the little thing that
these hoverboards are really shitty), Dune,
The Godfather Part III and the
aforementioned Blade Runner. There’s
little means to do this well, so the director opts for a proliferation of low
angled close-ups to hide the shoestring (for example in a Zeit/past battle
scenes).
Generally the action is threadbare, entirely without urgency or
tension (Mulcahy still throws in some wonderfully individual shots throughout, but they're in the service of nothing), from the dual Highlandergasms that restore Connor’s youth, to Katana’s
joyride on a subway train (complete with tonally gratuitous gore), to Connor
and Ramirez being shot to bits in a car just because they’re, like Immortal.
The big fight with Katana is entirely forgettable.
By which point Sean has exited, mostly because they couldn’t
afford him any more; that’s really how it feels (“My time here is over” and I need to kill myself in a big fan). We’ve
already traversed from incoherent to incoherent and indulgent (anything with Connery in Scotland, although it just
about gets a pass for being Connery, really isn’t very good; the staggeringly
unfunny appearance mid-Hamlet –
shouldn’t it have been the Scottish play? – and the visit to the tailor).
For the first half hour the picture’s sort of tolerable, before the sheer stupidity of what Mulcahy and
co have planned has fully unfolded. Lambert’s really enjoying himself doing his Vito Corleone old man act, and
there’s much nostalgia for the original (two Queen songs play, and that’s about
as close this gets to any kind of mood or atmosphere).
Anything involving Ironside is particularly wretched. He
basically admits he took the piss, which isn’t something to be proud of, and
his performance isn’t over-the-top in a good way; it’s wholly tiresome, and so
fits with the crappy dialogue he and everyone else gets (“After all these years, you’re still a jerk” notes Connor).
I’m not really sure what happened to Virginia Madsen’s movie
career (Sideways was a decade ago; I
see she’s in David O Russell’s upcoming Joy);
I guess it was as simple as a string of bad choices (like this). She plays a
good terrorist (you wouldn’t get one of those these days, or they’d call
themselves something else; she refutes the accusation), one with humanity’s
best interests at heart, who is shagged by Connor just as soon as he gets all
randy from beheading a couple of compatriots. She goes to Zeist or stays on
Earth with Connor, depending on the version you’ve seen, but in both she’s effectively
banished from existence by Highlander III,
with Connor’s new totty turning out to be Deborah Unger.
It probably shouldn’t be surprising the Highlander reboot is having so much trouble getting off the ground when the franchise’s history has been plagued by mediocrity (at best). Like The Crow, this seems to be a series where producers/studios are convinced there’s some money in but have little real enthusiasm for milking it. You’re unlikely to get anyone claiming any of the sequels are much cop, only discussing degrees of how bad they are and how much worse a particular instalment is than another. Which is a dubious honour. And yet the premise of the immortal, condemned to see others pass away as he remains every youthful, is a potent and understandably much plundered one. To turn that into a series you probably need more than just the bare bones of the original’s mythology, but you need to avoid the almost wilful incompetence of Highlander II.
