HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING (1991) Quick? How quick can you reach the eject button? Sometimes a movie accumulates such a bad reputation that it reaches a kind of legendary status. And sometimes, a movie accumulates such a bad reputation that if you bring it up in conversation, the conversation stops dead, everybody looks as you like you just farted up their noses, and nobody wants to talk to you anymore because you've ruined their night. Highlander 2: The Quickening is one such movie. Its problems are legion, but I'm forgiving. Maybe more than I should be, but that's one of the things that keep me watching movies; if I weren't forgiving, I'd be bitter and angry all the time, like you, and you, and you over there (but not you, you I like just fine the way your are). So even with this dreadful movie, I've always got an eye out for the silver lining in the acid raincloud. Let's start with the story. First, the year is 1999 (the movie was made in 1991, so we're already in the sci-fi zone), and the ozone layer has gotten thin enough that it actually makes Today's News. It's so thin that if we don't hurry up and do something about it yesterday, then you'd better get used to being a whole lot more blistery. Damn you, glam metal! This is all your fault! So a team of scientists headed up by one Connor Macleod (Christopher Lambert) devise...The Shield! 25 years later, Macleod is an old, long-haired man. The good news about life under The Shield is that it protects the earth from all that nasty solar radiation. The bad news is, it's always night, and the sky is all psychedelic, all the time. The only effect this seems to have had on the global ecology is a lot of rain. That this hasn't killed every plant on earth and put a dead stop to our having an ecosystem at all is something, I assume, the makers of The Shield factored into their design, and allowed whatever portion of sunlight plants need for photosynthesis to pass through The Shield. See? Forgiviness. It's while he's at the opera (in the future, opera stars are hot chicks) that things get wacky. Now, I don't really have a problem with the fact that this movie wildly contradicts the first film. I actually think it's kind of a neat idea. Same characters, same general situation and conflict, but totally different background, not too different from what was done with Evil Dead 2. I can't say I'm crazy about the specifics, but the shifto-changeo in background intrigues me. In the first movie, Macleod and the other immortals all apparently came from earth, fought amongst themselves killing each other by decapitation (the only way one of these guys can be killed) until there was only one left, who would get The Prize, which turned out to be mortality. Worst prize, ever. Macleod got that prize, and only now has he started to age normally again since he first found out he was an immortal back in medieval Scotland. But in the opera, that all changes. We see a bunch of flashbacks to the planet Zeist, 500 years ago. Yes, a whole other planet, in a whole other galaxy! Macleod and his old mentor Ramirez (Sean Connery) staged a rebellion against the evil Katana (Michael "Take a powder, machine!" Ironside), but were exiled to Earth to take part in this dreaded game for the Prize. Now, I'm being REALLY forgiving here in assuming that this is a different background and not one that tries to incorporate all the medieval-Scotland stuff from the first film. After all, if Macleod and Ramirez knew each other on Zeist, why would they meet for the first time in Scotland? One night at the bar (it's nice to see that in 2024, even relatively obscure Queen songs are available on the jukebox), Macleod sees a report on the TV about an eco-terrorist (Virginia Madsen) whose goal is to bring down The Shield because she believes the ozone layer has repaired itself and the enormous amounts of power and money being poured into the evil Shield corporation are a waste of resources (and she's probably tired of the psychedelic sky). Interestingly, Macleod himself has come to conclude that the cure may be worse than the disease, so he's not particularly judgmental towards Madsen, commenting rather approvingly only that she's a pretty girl. Anyway, for some reason, Katana, far away on this other planet, finally sees fit to get rid of Macleod (after whothehellcantellhowlong, NOW, he wants the job done?), so he sends two goofy-lookin' guys who ride flying surfboards like the Green Goblin to kill him. But he manages to kill them first. Remember how when an immortal kills another immortal, he absorbs all of the other immortal's power (and thus that of all the other immortals that immortal has killed and so on and so on)? Well, he uses that power to walk out of the fiery explosion young and, uh, reborn, or something. (nobody in any Highlander movie or TV episode ever shows any evidence of using this power to make themselves better at swordfighting) Then he kills the other immortal and uses that guy's immorto-power to bring back Ramirez, who materializes all of a sudden (fully clothed, like Nuclear Man in Superman 4) in the middle of a Scottish production of Hamlet. I do have to wonder if Ramirez and Macleod were still a Spaniard and a Scot even before they came to Earth, with names like those. Katana (who, if I recall correctly, does not use a katana), displeased at the failure of his minions (who had porcupine quills coming out of their heads, I forgot about the porcupine quills), sends himself to Earth to finish the job. He plows right through the ground and into a moving subway train, which he commandeers and runs off the rails just because it's fun. Does he have a one-liner at the end of the crash? Do you have to ask? So, Katana somehow instantly finds where the Shield corporation's boardroom is, and works his way onto the board fairly easily, all while using distinctly Earth-based metaphors like calling himself the corporation's "number-one draft choice". Macleod confirms the the Shield is a big scam now, and there's some fighting, and a deathtrap chamber (pretty weak so far as deathtrap chambers go), and an inevitable (quick-starting) love story between Macleod and the girl. There are a lot of stretches of logic in the plot, like how a car with the three heroes is shot up with thousands of bullets, "killing" the immortals but leaving the girl unharmed. Lots more where that came from. But I've picked on this movie's plot enough. Now it's time to pick on the acting. I'm not THAT forgiving. Connery, who was paid an obscene amount of money for his five or so minutes of mugging, is mostly here for "wacky" comic-relief scenes, like his appearance on stage, or later when he's trying to get some slightly more contemporary clothes. His last scene has him deliver one of those "I'm nobly sacrificing my life" speeches, which in very short order becomes one of those "I'm nobly sacrificing my life while using the Force" speeches. This is the kind of look-at-me-I'm-so-cool shit I might expect from Jack Nicholson, but I expect better from Connery. Madsen is fine, and Lambert is as Lambert as he's always been, no better, no worse. John C. McGinley plays the ruthless corporate vermin who heads the Shield company; nobody plays ruthless corporate vermin better than John C. McGinley. Ironside is a fairly typical villain, and though Ironside makes what must be a comfortable living playing typical villains, I should think that even he would agree that this role is beneath him. I suppose it's fairly well-directed (there are a few nifty special effects) and the action scenes serve their purpose, even when I get the feeling that my intelligence is dripping from having a big loogie spat upon it (Connery's perfectly battle-functionary sword is taken from that actor, who you'd think would be carrying a prop instead). There's a marginal amount of satisfactory eye-candy here, but when you're watching this on TV and you're getting the feeling you've wasted your money getting cable, you know something's seriously wrong. This is the kind of movie which can easily kill a series dead in its tracks, but it didn't; there were still two sequels and a TV series to go. Well, sometimes, if you make movies about immortals, your movies can die off hard. There's a "renegade version" of this movie, a "director's cut", if you will, which I haven't seen. It reportedly omits all the Zeist references and kinda makes sense - though one wonders, without Zeist, where the porcupine assassins came from. I'll bet a feature-length documentary about the making of this movie would've been fucking hilarious. As an educational experience, I'd recommend this highly to anybody who feels they need an abject lesson in what not to do, ever. As entertainment, well, there are no shortage of masochists out there. Life is short. 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