How does a mighty barbarian with a heart o' gold make his way in the world? If one listens to the portentous voiceover in this laughably unnecessary film, it's a healthy dose of "slaying, thieving, surviving." Which only makes sense, as what else is a kid to do after his father is butchered in front of his eyes by a bug-eyed father-and-daughter team who really should have worked out their issues in therapy rather than on the bodies of unlucky barbarians? Familial bonds broken, a pre-teen Conan (Leo Howard) sets out for adventure, vengeance, and -- we're led to think -- resolution of his serious case of survivor's guilt. The cliché-littered, lazy script gives him plenty of opportunity for the first two but not so much the last.
Director Marcus Nispel (veteran of many earlier remakes) doesn't give his hero (played in adulthood by Jason Momoa) much to do except run about the place slinging his sword. Granted, this is a great deal of what viewers want out of the guy, but it's still hard not to feel like a film that should be striving for epic-sized sword-clanging skullduggery isn't continually selling itself short. Robert Howard's old muscular proto-pulp stories were simple in a way, but they strove for a complex, world-building scope that gave Conan an endless array of deeply detailed pre-historical kingdoms and wild places to do battle in. While Nispel's fast-moving film jumps from one setting to the next with admirable speed, each new one is so cheaply introduced (one fake-looking CGI backdrop and claustrophobic set after another) that everything runs together. It's as though Conan is little more than a video game avatar chasing vengeance.
Against this shoddy backdrop and grimly unimaginative writing, scenes are banged out with only the most perfunctory dramatic glue holding them together. The film jumps from Conan's violent childhood baptism to his adulthood without any sense of what he had to undergo in between. When he steps back into the action after getting wind that his father's killer, the evil warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang, unimpeachable) is nearby, Conan offers up some fine bone-splitting swordplay but little else.
Momoa is a better actor at this point in his career than a certain Austrian weightlifter was some years back in John Milius's film, but that may actually be a hindrance. His Conan isn't particularly silent or barbaric or anything of note. He's just a very quick and gifted warrior who has a dreadlocked pirate buddy and an Ali Baba-like thieving partner. He even cracks jokes from time to time. While this makes Conan initially more relatable as a human being, it eventually leeches the character of any sense of uniqueness. In a film so shorn of originality that it replicates almost exactly a wagon-chase scene from this year's other fantasy disaster Your Highness (granted, they were likely shot simultaneously, but still), this is a critical flaw. It also makes lines like "I live, I love, I slay, and I am content," even harder to swallow than they might normally be.
Coming closer to inhabiting the true, weird spirit of Howard's fantasia, not surprisingly, are the villains. Lang has the blazing-eyed and clenched-jaw intensity of a Shakespearean actor gone mad in the tropics while his steel-clawed witch-assassin daughter Marique (Rose McGowan) has a homicidal hiss and purr that brings a welcome burn of perversity to her scenes. Amidst Conan's stewpot of thudding heavy-metal hysteria, where at least three scenes are capped with a character holding something (bloody sword, bloody baby) aloft and loudly grunting, one has to take entertainment wherever it can be found.
Director Marcus Nispel (veteran of many earlier remakes) doesn't give his hero (played in adulthood by Jason Momoa) much to do except run about the place slinging his sword. Granted, this is a great deal of what viewers want out of the guy, but it's still hard not to feel like a film that should be striving for epic-sized sword-clanging skullduggery isn't continually selling itself short. Robert Howard's old muscular proto-pulp stories were simple in a way, but they strove for a complex, world-building scope that gave Conan an endless array of deeply detailed pre-historical kingdoms and wild places to do battle in. While Nispel's fast-moving film jumps from one setting to the next with admirable speed, each new one is so cheaply introduced (one fake-looking CGI backdrop and claustrophobic set after another) that everything runs together. It's as though Conan is little more than a video game avatar chasing vengeance.
Against this shoddy backdrop and grimly unimaginative writing, scenes are banged out with only the most perfunctory dramatic glue holding them together. The film jumps from Conan's violent childhood baptism to his adulthood without any sense of what he had to undergo in between. When he steps back into the action after getting wind that his father's killer, the evil warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang, unimpeachable) is nearby, Conan offers up some fine bone-splitting swordplay but little else.
Momoa is a better actor at this point in his career than a certain Austrian weightlifter was some years back in John Milius's film, but that may actually be a hindrance. His Conan isn't particularly silent or barbaric or anything of note. He's just a very quick and gifted warrior who has a dreadlocked pirate buddy and an Ali Baba-like thieving partner. He even cracks jokes from time to time. While this makes Conan initially more relatable as a human being, it eventually leeches the character of any sense of uniqueness. In a film so shorn of originality that it replicates almost exactly a wagon-chase scene from this year's other fantasy disaster Your Highness (granted, they were likely shot simultaneously, but still), this is a critical flaw. It also makes lines like "I live, I love, I slay, and I am content," even harder to swallow than they might normally be.
Coming closer to inhabiting the true, weird spirit of Howard's fantasia, not surprisingly, are the villains. Lang has the blazing-eyed and clenched-jaw intensity of a Shakespearean actor gone mad in the tropics while his steel-clawed witch-assassin daughter Marique (Rose McGowan) has a homicidal hiss and purr that brings a welcome burn of perversity to her scenes. Amidst Conan's stewpot of thudding heavy-metal hysteria, where at least three scenes are capped with a character holding something (bloody sword, bloody baby) aloft and loudly grunting, one has to take entertainment wherever it can be found.
