Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Rating: 3/10

Conan the Barbarian is based on the works of Robert E.Howard, a man who wanted a pulpy story set apart from the usual locales, so he created a series of works set in a ‘land before time’ so to speak, after the fall of Atlantis but before any history as we know it. The story was originally adapted into the classic film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger which, is either so bad it’s good, or so cool it’s awesome, depending on who you ask. I, myself, have never seen the ‘original’ Conan, but I did have the misfortune of watching this film last night.

Misfortune, why? Well first I’ll be kind and talk about what this film did right: It had some good actors, the special effects looked good(ish), the music was good, Morgan Freeman did some narration (as always), and that’s about it.

See, the goal of a movie is to engage with the audience: to entertain them, move them in some way. Conan the Barbarian is boring, incredibly boring. Sure there’s gore, but it’s cringe worthy for no good reason at all; all of the gore is superfluous, and adds nothing to the story. The blood in the movie was wrong, at times pouring (if not flying) from the throats and bodies of Conan’s enemies, and at other times being conspicuously absent.

Another problem was the fighting; with an over-reliance on action shots which ultimately confound the action, and yet still manage to show how slow the fights are. Rather than seeing some powerful warlords and barbarians fighting on-screen, every fight shuffled along at a geriatric pace, weighing the film down further and further in its own mediocrity. This is a damn shame, as Conan should, if nothing else, have some half decent fighting.

Conan is a bad movie, but not so much from poor production values, but from poor writing. It’s a boring, cliché ridden mess of a film which never seems to end, a film who’s length managed to stretch on far longer than it should have, defying all laws of relativity. Weather it was the poor dialogue, the slow fights, or the complete and utter lack of any characterisation, Conan is ultimately a film which is neither so bad that it’s good, nor so cool that it’s awesome; Conan the Barbarian is just… So ‘meh’ that it’s ‘meh’.

Written for the now very dead website Comikkazzee, published on the 10th of July, 2012.