From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Feb 13 18:13:02 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.reviews,rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!news.funet.fi!news.eunet.fi!EU.net!news.kreonet.re.kr!insosf1.infonet.net!newshost.marcam.com!zip.eecs.umich.edu!caen!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken.llnl.gov!fnnews.fnal.gov!gw1.att.com!nntpa!not-for-mail From: rfurr@jazz.ncren.net (Rob Furr) Subject: REVIEW: HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION Message-ID: Followup-To: rec.arts.movies,rec.arts.sf.movies Summary: r.a.m.r. #03278 Originator: ecl@mtgp003 Keywords: author=Furr Sender: ecl@mtgpfs2.att.com (Evelyn C. Leeper) Nntp-Posting-Host: mtgp003.mt.att.com Reply-To: rfurr@jazz.ncren.net (Rob Furr) Organization: MCNC Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 21:32:58 GMT Approved: ecl@mtgpfs2.att.com Lines: 79 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.movies.reviews:2623 rec.arts.sf.reviews:720 HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION A film review by Rob Furr Copyright 1995 Rob Furr Highlander: The Randomly-Selected Descriptive Phrase If there's been a more chaotic entertainment franchise to come out in the last decade than HIGHLANDER and associated works, I haven't found it. From the original film, which is arguably one of the greatest fantasies ever to appear on celluloid (not that that's saying much; its competition has been, for the most part, on the level of, say, KRULL,) we've seen a slew of derivative works ranging from the entertaining to the surreal. There's HIGHLANDER, the syndicated drama, there's HIGHLANDER: THE ANIMATED SERIES, there's HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING, and, now, HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION (a.k.a. HIGHLANDER: THE SORCEROR, I believe.) The two television series have nothing to do with each other, the movies have absolutely nothing to do with the television series, and little to do with each other, and, for all I know, there'll soon be HIGHLANDER: THE CEREAL, which will have about as much to do with anything else in the series as the a small potato in Riner, VA, has to do with economic policy in the Ukraine. That very confusion has led to decreased expectations for further entries in the HIGHLANDER canon; what can you look forward to once you've experienced the true, majestic awfulness that is HIGHLANDER: THE ANIMATED SERIES? So, I approached the current HIGHLANDER movie with some trepidation; could the movie makers pull something watchable from the morass of the HIGHLANDER mythos? They did. Amazing, but true. Note that I didn't say that it was a *good* movie, and I very carefully did not imply that HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION is a *great* movie, but it is watchable. The previous film entry, HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING was completely and utterly rotten as a sequel. On the other hand, if, through some miracle, the viewer could forget that the original movie ever existed, it wasn't that bad. Not great, not by a long shot, but it was only a slightly-lower-than-average attempt at movie-making, with "only" four or five gaping holes where a plot should have been. On the other hand, we have HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION which, as a sequel, is pretty good. As a stand-alone movie, it stinks. The viewer *has* to have seen the original movie to enjoy this one. Apparently realizing this, the movie makers used several clips from the original film in this one. Events, characters, terms, scenes, and locales from the original are all used or referred to during the course of THE FINAL DIMENSION, and only a knowledge of HIGHLANDER itself can save it from totally confusing the viewer. So, if you've never seen the original HIGHLANDER, this is a movie to stay far, far away from. On the other hand, if you *have* seen the original movie, THE FINAL DIMENSION is actually not that bad. It suffers a bit from sequelitis, in that certain scenes are frame-by-frame copies of scenes in the original (For instance, Kane, the primary antagonist of THE FINAL DIMENSION dresses like the Kurgan, has the same voice as the Kurgan, and acts like the Kurgan, even down to his manic driving style. It's actually a pity he's not the Kurgan, but, hey, there can be only one,) it needs the previous movie, and bits of it are included for no readily apparent reason ... but that's about it. The filmmakers do a credible job apologizing for HIGHLANDER II; they strive for and mostly capture the feel of the original movie. The cinematography is weaker, the transitions that were the signature of the original are slightly more intrusive, the music is more generic.... ... and yet, it's as close to the original as you can get without digging Freddy Mercury up and having him record another soundtrack. On the Furr Scale, this is either a solid three star two-star movie (a pretty good, if unambitious movie) or a pitiful one star two-star movie (a rotten unambitious movie,) depending on whether or not you've seen the original. Moreover, it's exactly the prototypical matinee movie; this is the perfect movie for a slow Saturday afternoon. Park your brain at the door, and let it flow in one eye and out the other. From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Feb 13 18:14:35 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.reviews,rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!news.funet.fi!news.eunet.fi!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!sgiblab!pacbell.com!att-out!nntpa!not-for-mail From: walkerj@access.digex.net (John Walker) Subject: REVIEW: HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION Message-ID: Followup-To: rec.arts.movies,rec.arts.sf.movies Summary: r.a.m.r. #03279 Originator: ecl@mtgp003 Keywords: author=Walker Sender: ecl@mtgpfs2.att.com (Evelyn C. Leeper) Nntp-Posting-Host: mtgp003.mt.att.com Reply-To: walkerj@access.digex.net (John Walker) Organization: Express Access Online Communications, Greenbelt, MD USA Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 21:33:43 GMT Approved: ecl@mtgpfs2.att.com Lines: 298 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.movies.reviews:2616 rec.arts.sf.reviews:716 HIGHLANDER: THE FINAL DIMENSION A film review by John Walker Copyright 1995 John Walker In brief: If you don't go in with any great expectations, I think you'll find that HIGHLANDER 3 is a perfectly adequate action-adventure flick. It doesn't dawdle, and it has some really neat settings, a suitably slimy villain, and a fair number of satisfying adventure ideas. Unfortunately, it seems to be lacking whatever "something" it would take to get me running back for a second viewing. A cult film, I don't think it will be. But because I found it pleasant, it *does* give me occasion to think about what's missing. <> We have here an immortal hero, Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert). He's sitting at the feet of an immortal wizard, Nokono (Mako) in the wizard's cave in 16th-century Japan. Out in the snow is riding an immortal villain, Kane (Mario Van Peebles), with two immortal henchmen, to off the wizard and the hero. Specifically, he intends to decapitate them. If he does so, he gets the power of his victim. In this flick, that's just part of the immortals business. And decapitation, by the bye, seems to be the only way to kill these immortals--although except for a really impressive regenerative ability, they're not much stronger or brighter than average. The really big thing about these immortals, however, is that "There can only be one". There can be a number of players on the field for a long time, but ultimately the immortals game is *not* a win-win situation. MacLeod may be unwilling to off Nokono to improve his position, but Kane is, after all, a villain, and under no such restraint. In the ensuing contretemps, the cave falls in on the villain and henchmen, but the hero escapes. Now it's the present, and an Important and Controversial Archaeologist, Alex Johnson (Deborah Unger) is called to the construction site for a big high-tech project in Japan. Guess where it is! They know it's some sort of archaeological site, and she's there because the local archaeologists have brought her in as their big gun against the business types who just want to get their plant built. Needless to say, her thing is to use legends and stuff as clues to archaeology. She only needs to touch down for a minute before she thinks of Nokono and his cave. While the decision makers are fretting over the contest between antiquities and economics, things are rumbling downstairs. Kane _et al._ emerge. Being cooped up for 400 years has not made them any nicer or fonder of MacLeod, and they set out to complete unfinished business. On the other side of the world, MacLeod set up digs a few years ago near Marrakech, Morocco. He has a nice life and an adopted son, John (Gabriel Kakon). By means we needn't discuss here, MacLeod realizes that the game is afoot, and decamps for New York City (site of HIGHLANDER 2 ten years before, by the way). In New York, the trio will meet. And, oh, did I note that Alex is a dead ringer for Sarah, a former love of MacLeod's from the 1700s? Well, she is. So, do you have it all set up? It's simple arithmetic, really. Number of immortals in movie equals "n". Number of immortals at end of movie who have heads still affixed cannot exceed n - (n - 1). Or from the other perspective, decapitations cannot be less than n - 1. Is that a formula for an action-adventure, or what? <> First, let it be noted that I never saw HIGHLANDER 1 or 2. HIGHLANDER 1 seems to have been rather well liked, HIGHLANDER 2 frequently denounced as a dog having nothing to do with HIGHLANDER 1. In HIGHLANDER 3, I get the feeling that the filmmakers have tried to put in some stuff to make the two previous flicks all part of the same story/universe. But for me, I have to take HIGHLANDER 3 on its own. And we might as well start with acting, since my main question that might be answered by the the other two films could also be an acting problem. In the opening scenes, MacLeod seems almost a bit childlike. Either that, or a bit of a wimp. In the later scenes, neither trait shows up. Acting? Or a reference to previous history? I don't know. For those of you who have never seen Christopher Lambert, by the way, he speaks with an unplaceable European accent. For fantasy's sake, someone might say that it's how a native Gaelic speaker from the 1500s might speak English. But in a brief flashback to those days, his burr didn't sound too unusual. I assume Lambert is following in the Schwartzenegger and Van Damme tradition. (We may even come to *expect* adventure heroes to speak with foreign accents!) Van Peebles, of course, has no problems with accents. And depending on your taste, he may be reason alone to see or avoid HIGHLANDER 3. His Kane is more slimy than sinister, more creepy than cold, not a genuinely serious tyrant or monster. Van Peebles plays him with an inner core of silliness. It's almost like he wants to stop and demand that the audience boo and hiss when he comes on stage. Then he can preen himself on our hostility. For her part, Unger carries off the Alex/Sarah role nicely. She's attractive, assertive, and the stuff modern audiences presumably expect. But she's not really a player in the action. Those roles are for immortals. Even the police detective, Lt. Stenn (Martin Neufeld), who is trying to pin unlawful-decapitation raps on MacLeod going back to HIGHLANDER 2, is really a cipher, having little impact on the action of the film. <> Al right, having said that the detective has little affect on the action, we can move to the main virtue of HIGHLANDER 3 as an adventure: it *moves*. I wasn't bored; I wasn't wondering when they were going to get something done so that we could get back to the real stuff. There are flashbacks to MacLeod's affair with Alex's double in the 1700s; there are scenes where MacLeod and Alex size one another up; but they didn't bother me. (Although they may have contributed to a lack of focus.) For those of you turned off by mindless gore, by the way, I thought the decapitations were very well handled. Can I say, extremely tasteful beheadings? Depicting the events straightforwardly, but not intended to get folks to upchuck. Similarly, the special effects were worked in nicely. It didn't look like just a lot of money spent to impress the rubes. For instance, when an immortal kills another, he is surrounded by sort of swirling light currents, the dead body levitates, etc. Like the decapitations, nicely done, not vulgar or ostentatious. True, there were improbabilities piled on improbabilities--not the least of which being *everything* about Alex. But they were *useful* improbabilities--they moved the action along. Nonetheless, while I'm willing to give a action flick its improbabilities, I figure it's sloppy on the filmmakers' part if they overdo it. And HIGHLANDER 3 strikes me as having overdone it. There were at least a couple of major points where I was thinking to a character that "This is a demonstrably uncool move on *your* part, neighbor." But, like I say, I can be forgiving on mere irrationality--so long as the film gives me something in return. And HIGHLANDER 3 shows glimmers of having something in stock, but someone is too lazy or unimaginative to bring it all out. I don't know who exactly to blame, but the screenplay was by Paul Ohl, the story by William Panzer and Brad Mirman. In all this, also, you can try to decide to what extent director Andy Morahan should take credit or blame. <> Now, if you're looking for reasons why HIGHLANDER 3 is less successful than it might be, some of you might think of those tasteful decapitations. I mean, isn't "action-adventure" supposed to be a euphemism for gore-flick? Well, the critics frequently act as if "action equals gore", and action flicks *do* seem to have a cavalier attitude towards dismemberment, disembowelment, and other means of egress from this vale of tears. But I don't think that action films or action fans *demand* it. What I think is necessary is propulsion, movement--in other words, action films need *action*. (Gee, how surprising!) Spectacular killings are a lazy way of achieving or imitating action. HIGHLANDER 3 has movement, yes, but it didn't strike me as *going* anywhere. We know we need a big fight between Kane and MacLeod, but the stuff on the way seems only stuff on the way. There's little build of events that tie things together with the climax crowning it all. One doesn't *lead* to another in HIGHLANDER 3; instead, one thing merely *follows* another. It's just a sort of sparring. Now, I can't really figure out to demonstrate this weakness. I mean, the story does move nicely; it's a workmanlike job, so I can't point to obvious gaffes; still less could I suggest corrections. But besides action, we also have to consider "adventure". I figure an action-adventure has to give me some neat ideas or events or surroundings. It has to give me something I want to imagine myself doing, or something that is really fascinating even if negative somehow (frightening, say). And in that respect, I can point to HIGHLANDER 3's scenery, its backdrops. There is *always* a nice background or setting throughout the film. A desert in Morocco, barren hills in Scotland, a plush apartment in New York with windows on a cityscape, the high-tech plant in Japan, a sort of surreal industrial facility for the climax. Neat! We've got the setting, now what *action* will take place there? How am I going to imagine myself being the *hero* in that neat, impressive scene? But *most* of the time, the action doesn't use the "dramatic" backgrounds. It doesn't give me any feel of giants battling in a more-than-ordinary world. And there's nothing to give me some *idea* or *emotion* to go along with the background, not for me, not for the characters on screen. <> Take a fairly important scene--where MacLeod and one of the henchvillains are in a hospital laundry room. It's a drying room with sheets hanging everywhere, so they can't see each other. (True, most hospitals probably got rid of their drying rooms sometime during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, but I've agreed to overlook mere practical impossibility.) Such a scene might be very high-tension if we were dealing, say, with a kid, or someone really vulnerable. We'd be trying to look around every corner. Where's the bad guy now?! But we've got an *immortal* here! The *hero*! Against a complete no-name! I'm sorry, dramatic tension is hard for me under such circumstances. All those nifty backgrounds--unfortunately, that's all they are. Take the New York apartment in an apparently squalid neighborhood. That's a pretty "archetypal" image--think of Fu Manchu. Glamor and power hidden in the slums. But HIGHLANDER 3 doesn't do anything with it. It's just another place along the way. And it's the same with the other nifty backgrounds. First, as noted, I didn't feel much interaction between scenery and action. But second, they're all sorts of different scenery. I didn't come a way with any image that tied up the film for me. It's like we do this scene here, and then we do that scene there. Nothing continues. Nothing grows. To see how other people have handled something, think of the first GHOSTBUSTERS. They repeatedly showed the art-deco apartment building where we *knew* something creepy was going on. The building was always highlighted against dark, stormy skies. For more than a year after seeing it, I would look up at certain apartment buildings, with the sky and clouds behind them, and I'd experience the neat little thrill of the GHOSTBUSTERS building. With neat backdrops all over, HIGHLANDER 3 gave me no such image. Is it that the filmmakers were just lazy? Would it have been too much work to tie together the dramatic background with the action of the flick? Would it have been too much work to throw in something to show why someone *had* to do something or why they didn't *want* to do something else? <> In fact, though, something else *might* be going on--almost an *anti*-action-adventure theme. Suffice it to say that that with all the wide-open possibilities, the fights all take place in constrained circumstances--the cave and the drying room, for instance. I can see that they might have been chosen for emotional or symbolic or dramatic purposes. (For me, the cave is the most notable, and the most successful scene for a fight.) But they're still all sort of close-in, sort of claustrophobic. Is this larger-than-life? Is this heroic? Or is it some shrink-influenced imagery? Maybe it was trying to give some image of descending into the dark corners of the psyche to engage in conflict. If so, it was only half done--note that I said "sort of" claustrophobic. In any event, at the end, it feels like everybody just gave up. We get the climax, and then after a few minutes it ends, just *ends*. I don't feel like doing a spoiler here, so all I can do is say that the ending was for me incredibly unsatisfying. I just sat there and said "What?" We went through the whole flick to get *this*!? The promos have said that this is the last HIGHLANDER, that Lambert is "retiring" the MacLeod character. If so, the ending is more disappointing, because with all the questions it raised in my mind, at least I could figure it was rational if it was leaving the field open for HIGHLANDER 4. (And there were other possible sequel threads left untied, too.) <> Note, again, that I thought that this was a pleasant, enjoyable flick. It was workmanlike, smoothly done. It didn't lag, it kept me involved. Nonetheless, just by thinking about some of the potentials that littered the landscape--the landscape itself, the backgrounds, being collectively one of them--I can feel disappointed. In that light, I can disagree with but understand the vehemence with which some people have panned HIGHLANDER 3. (The reaction on alt.cult-movies has *not* been generous!) On the basis of what HIGHLANDER 3 actually delivered to us, the condemnations have been unfounded. But if we think of the film's *potential*, then the outrage is understandable. We got a nice, pleasant film. The film itself indicates that we could have gotten a *lot* more. John Walker walkerj@access.digex.net