Highlander **** (1986, Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Clancy Brown) – Classic Movie Review 2331

Director Russell Mulcahy’s rousing 1986 fantasy adventure is a hugely enjoyable entertainment. Even if it seems to owe a debt to the flashy video techniques of the day and the likes of other superior movies like Blade Runner and The Terminator, it is filmed with very considerable style, energy and imagination of its own.

Christopher Lambert makes a suitably square-jawed hero as the legendary Connor ‘The Highlander’ MacLeod, an immortal 16th-century Scotsman, who does not die when he wounded in battle but is banished from his village.

He meets another immortal – Spanish grandee sword-master Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez – who teaches him swordsmanship, survival methods and the ways of the immortals. Unfortunately, the only way to kill other immortals is to cut off their heads.

Then he is whisked off to present-day America to confront the ultimate villain, his last immortal opponent, the murderously brutal barbarian The Kurgan. The Gathering is being held in New York, where Connor and the few remaining immortals battle to the end for the fabled Prize.

Real Scotsman Sean Connery is enormous fun in an all too brief extended star cameo as Juan Ramirez. It’s a huge tribute to the charisma of Lambert and Connery that both men triumph over being ludicrously cast and trapped in spectacularly incongruous accents. Although born in the US, Lambert is French, by the way, leaving America when he was only two years old. Connery was born in Edinburgh. Clancy Brown is also excellent as Victor Kruger / The Kurgan.

Maybe Mulcahy hasn’t managed to make his movie too coherent, and evidently harsh cutting certainly hasn’t helped, but both the film and the two stars have enviable energy and a sense of fun. Queen’s song It’s a Kind of Magic became a hit.

The story and co-screenplay are by Gregory Widen, who also provided us with The Prophecy.

It runs 128 minutes with the cut version running at 111 minutes.

Also in the cast are Roxanne Hart as Brenda J. Wyatt, Alan North as Lieutenant Frank Moran, Beatie Edney as Heather MacLeod, Sheila Gish as Rachel Ellenstein, John Polito as Det. Walter Bedsoe, Hugh Quarshie as Sunda Kastagir, Christopher Malcolm, Peter Diamond, Billy Hartman, James Cosmo, Celia Imrie and Alistair Findley.

There are four sequels and a TV series so far, starting with Mulcahy’s Highlander 2: The Quickening (1990). As movie characters go, Connor ‘The Highlander’ MacLeod, is certainly an immortal.

Dave Bautista is cast as The Kurgan in the 2015 Highlander reboot.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2331

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