A little bit gorebarian, a little bit borebarian

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This article was published 19/08/2011 (5523 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Early ads for the movie Pulp Fiction took the trouble to explain that “pulp” had two pertinent meanings: 1) the cheap paper product used to print paperback literature, and, 2) damaged flesh, as in: “beaten to a pulp.”

Director Marcus Nispel’s rebooted Conan the Barbarian has the freebooter’s boots planted firmly in both camps.

That is proper; Conan has his literary roots in the pulp fiction of Texan fantasy writer Robert E. Howard. Nispel, whose credits include the reboots of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, has a demonstrable taste for blood and mayhem, which he indulges here with a kind of adolescent glee.

It ain’t Macbeth. But Nispel, who has more than his share of detractors, does actually invest the material with subtler shades amid all that crimson blood, starting right at the opening scene in which we see how Conan literally was “born on the battlefield” and was thus destined to a life of armed conflict.

As a boy, the young Conan (Leo Howard) proves his mettle during a contest among the other village youngsters designed to show who is most aggressive and fleet of foot. Arriving at the finish line bearing the heads of a few marauding enemies, Conan… um, wins.

But that quaint pastoral village life is not to be sustained when a pack of soldiers under the command of wild-eyed warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) invades, killing everyone in the village, including Conan’s father (Ron Perlman), and leaving the lad swearing revenge.

Years later, Conan has grown into the impressive frame of the towering Jason Momoa, and revenge is still on his mind, along with the usual barbarian activities of piracy, gnawing of shanks of lamb, and enjoying the company of undiscriminating wenches. He gets wind of Khalar Zym and his evil sorceress daughter Marique (Rose McGowan) in hot pursuit of a cloistered female monk Tamara (Rachel Nichols), whose sacrifice is needed to make the pair all-powerful. Conan intercepts Tamara himself, with predictable sparky results. Let’s just say it’s a good thing the sacrifice does not involve a virgin.

The casting here is mostly appropriate, with the exception of Rachel Nichols, who is blond, beautiful but altogether too rooted in contemporary behaviour to play the primitive-world heroine. (The role calls for an innocent with an undercurrent of sensual wildcat; Nichols seems to be shooting for Meg Ryan sass.)

In the two films of the early ’80s, Arnold Schwarzenegger looked exactly like a bodybuilder with a hair band wig plunked on his head. Momoa looks, sounds and sneers more like the authentic real deal.

Best of all is Rose McGowan. Deprived of an opportunity to play Howard’s female barbarian heroine Red Sonja, McGowan seems to be making up for it by making the most of Marique, a perverse fiend one minute, and an affection-seeking daddy’s girl the next.

Nispel and the film’s three credited screenwriters strive to hit the right notes when it comes to delivering the swords-and-sorcery goods of Howard’s novel, and they do, mostly.

Yet when compared to John Milius’s 1982 film version, Nispel comes up short. Yes, the film may have looked goofy, with its muscleman hero and its plastic-breasted (but-oh-so-’80s) female lead Sandahl Bergman. But at least Milius chose to invest Howard’s pulp fiction with a substantial philosophical backbone of Nietzschean nihilism and even a touch of satire. (Milius’s portrayal of a sect of snake worshippers is as elegant a deconstruction of contemporary cult mentality as you could find.)

Conan the Barbarian rebooted is perfectly acceptable B-movie entertainment. But by its lack of ambition, it proves that, sometimes, less isn’t more.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Conan the Barbarian:

 

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humour of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword-and-sorcery epic Conan the Barbarian and you’ve got an idea what the new Conan is like.

— Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

 

A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.

— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

 

Here’s a movie that’s simultaneously lavishly violent and numbing, visually ornate and undistinguished, epic and shallow, relentlessly noisy and tone-deaf, workmanlike and unfilling.

— Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

 

It didn’t seem possible for there to be even less characterization than there was in the original Conan, but voila.

— Christy Lemire, Associated press

 

Conan The Barbarian is the film equivalent of having someone punch you in the face for two straight hours while someone screams in your ear.

— Drew McWeeny, Hitfix

 

Nispel certainly succeeds in making a gutsy, ballsy, bloody action-adventure flick worthy of its central character’s towering, archetypal mythos.

— Eric Free, Filmink

 

Squeamish types may balk, but the gory cruelty on display here is faithful to the source material and deeply thrilling.

— Mark Holcomb, Village Voice

 

With all earnestness, (director Marcus) Nispel embraces the property’s classic roots, placing this new Conan squarely within the tradition of sword-and-sorcery pics.

— Peter Debruge, Variety

 

Though the adventure gushes with blood (there’s an amateur C-section on the battlefield), it’s also packed with thrills and sexy romance.

— Thelma Adams, Us Weekly

 

A movie that is frenzied but unexciting, packed with action but lacking in distinctive moments… the camera is perpetually half a beat behind whatever it is you want to see.

— Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine

 

A dull and desultory affair that’ll leave you feeling as cheated as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s missus.

— Neil Smith, Total Film

 

This ultra-violent action-adventure, a passable 3-D version of the same character (but different tale) Schwarzenegger played in 1982, delivers the basic goods (but no more) expected of primitive mythic epos driven by CGI.

— Emanuel Levy, emanuellevy.com

 

Compiled by Shane Minkin