Two stars. Rating: R, for strong, bloody violence, gore, nudity and sensuality
By Derrick Bang
You sure didn't want to be a woman during the Hyborian Age.
Or a horse.
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| Conan (Jason Momoa, left) has just rescued Tamara (Rachel Nichols) from a bad guy. Conan's now about to beat the stuffing out of said bad guy, while Tamara cowers in terror. In fairness, Tamara soon will demonstrate quite a bit more pluck: a good thing, because this gloomy flick needs all the personality it can get. |
The latter, apparently deemed of no value, routinely had their legs cut out from under them, in order to unseat the rider for easier dispatch on the ground.
The former, apparently deemed of minimal value, were enslaved or snatched as chattel, reflexively raped and passed among fellow mercenaries like biscuits at an afternoon tea. Which, from all appearances, seems not to have bothered these usually bare-breasted babes, who enthusiastically accepted their lustful lot in life. (I believe we call this a male-centric point of view.)
Exceptions existed, of course. Some women were lucky enough to train as sequestered monks; they lived a peaceful life until adversity forced them to demonstrate damn impressive fighting skills. (You never can tell about those monks!)
Alternatively, a growing young woman could become a witch, at which point she got to wear Freddy Krueger-style razored fingernails and summon sand demons. While remaining more or less fully clad, which I guess would have been a bonus.
These efforts at mocking levity represent the sole comedy relief you'll get from Conan the Barbarian, as humorless a thud-and-blunder bloodbath as I've seen in awhile. Yes, author Robert E. Howard's iconic warrior has been resurrected yet again: the most recent entry in a revival that began in the early 1970s, when Howard's 1930s Weird Tales novelettes were adapted into a popular Marvel Comics series
, which in turn encouraged paperback reprints of the original stories
and, a bit later, a 1982 film
— and 1984 sequel
— that boosted Arnold Schwarzenegger's nascent career.While this new film's Jason Momoa certainly sports the necessary physique for all this hacking and slashing, he's at best only a marginally better actor than Schwarzenegger was. Young Leo Howard does a much better job as Conan's boyhood self, in this film's first act; for openers, he has a much better scowl.
Not that acting chops are of much significance. Momoa gets by on the sort of monosyllabic grunts and chopped-off sentences that Johnny Weissmuller made famous as the similarly heroic Tarzan, way back in the day. The so-called story here — stitched together by Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood — is long on battlefield fury and eyebrow-raising coincidence, and short on plot logic or common sense.
