What possessed Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery and Virginia Madsen to appear in such a stupid movie?
Michael Ironside is Captain Katana. It’s very clever, isn’t it, a movie about swordfighters and the evil antagonist has a name that is Japanese for sword. Actually, no, it’s not so clever. Neither are the scenes of aliens flying through the streets on hang gliders, so that it takes quite a while to bring both players into a position for a single sword collision.
The movie starts a bit like the first Highlander (which millions loved), but instead of opening in a wrestling dome, has a very old Christopher Lambert slumped on a chair, falling asleep, half watching a pretty boring opera. The picture of him slumping in the chair soon becomes a mirror for just about every audience mirror who is dumb enough to expose themselves to such vomit-bad cinema.
He then goes to a nearby watering hole and encounters someone (who has just appeared on TV). I went to the loo at this point and when I came back they were making love, so not sure how, in barely one or two minutes, that happened. Oh, now I remember. Lambert suddenly becomes very young (against his will), and is so hot, that Virginia Madsen just has to have him immediately.
There’s another ludicrous scene involving a taxi driver and Michael Ironside. Ironside stabs his sword through the divider that separates driver from passenger – and the driver seems to get a kick of it, chortling: “Shit, fuck, yeah man! Out of control.” But then he starts to lose his nerve and says: “Shit man, I should have stayed in school.”
After Ironside has turned the car into crumpled metal and glass fragments (for fun I suppose), he murmurs in the cabbies ear: “Put this on my tab, and Jerry, add a little something for yourself.” Um…yeah.
There’s an okay scene after a lightning bolt throws Sean Connery into the middle of Hamlet at a theatre in Edinburgh. Connery walks into the ‘oldest tailor store in Scotland’ and does some modeling for us while he’s getting dressed. He does have style, but did he even read the script before acting in this dud?
Then there’s a scene where Virginia Madsen tries to demystify the whole Highlander scenario: “So you guys can live forever on earth, unless your heads get chopped off, but when only one of you is left, then you’re mortal again, otherwise if more of you people come from your planet then you become immortal again, unless you go back to your planet.”
“Something like that,” MacLeod sniggers.
It’s at this point that someone needed to give him a mighty whack on the back of his head.
Meanwhile, it’s 2024 and Ramirez (Connery) is flying without any money, in a propeller driven plane. Huh? But the safety film he watches on the plane is a classic.
Ironside, in a church, says to the highlander: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If you don’t take it out and use it, it’s going to rust.”
The Highlander responds: “After all these years, you’re still a jerk. I was ready to grow old and die. You changed everything. Now, I’m immortal again.” Okay-y-y.
Then we cut again to a red sky. Now I wonder: How do electromagnetic rays protect the atmosphere from solar radiation?
Taking their cue again from the first movie, we have the car chase supplanted by an underground subway train under Ironside’s control. He pushes a lever forward, making the train go as fast as it can, which turns out to be supersonic speed. As the train speeds up, eyes pop out of heads and lights shatter. Um…yeah.
Cheesiest line of the whole movie: “Say goodbye Highlander.”
“Why, are you going somewhere?”
So was there anything I liked about the film? Sure, the safety flick Connery watches on board the airplane is a classic. And there’s something evocative about the Highlander talking about the world (our world) as a sort of Paradise Lost. Since the atmosphere, sun and seasons are gone, he has to explain to Madsen what the world was like before she was born, and the world we know so well.
The Highlander describes: “The smell of the grass after the rain. The clouds. We thought it would last forever.” It evoked the strong theme of the first flick – of the impermanence of life, its frailty, but also its subtle beauty and power, and how valuable our relationships and genealogical history can become. It’s also about where we come from, the tapestry of the past unfolding into our time. But Highlander II fleetingly touches on this, and then loses the plot completely.
The most absurd scene: Amazing grace, the bagpipe version, and Connery somehow moving a giant steel extractor fan with a cocoon of light that hatches out of the palm of his hand. Who knows how that’s supposed to make sense?
And finally: Isn’t it funny how the girl appears to still love the hero, just after he has brutally decapitated his foe. When she runs forward to embrace him, isn’t she worried she might stumble over the errant head, slip on the blood, or get brainy goo on her blouse.
Apparently, ‘a kind of magic’ overwhelms these sensibilities, or we have become so dumbed-down by stupid entertainment that we don’t notice.
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