Retconning a franchise in the middle of its run is a fairly standard, run of the mill practice these days, especially whenever a studio wants to nudge a long-running series back on track after any narrative wobbles – however, few could argue that after the legendarily dire Highlander II: The Quickening, a systemic rethink of the Highlander mythos wasn’t just advisory, but downright vital.
Hence we got Highlander III: The Sorcerer, a sequel that had the balls to emerge a mere three years after damage wrought by it’s famously misshapen predecessor. However, in case you’re wondering why anyone would bother, you have to realise that the franchise had experienced something of a redemption after being propped up by the clunky, yet strangely beloved TV spinoff that started in 1992. So does this third, evermore strained attempt, at insisting that there can only be one, manage to do the franchise justice? Not even a sorcerer could pull out that amount of magic.
Neatly side-stepping all that sci-fi, doomed future bullshit from Highlander II, we zip back in time to the 16th century, when the Immortal Connor McLeod of the clan McLeod first left the highlands of Scotland after the death of his wife, Heather, and headed to Japan for a change of scenery. Here he finds the Immortal sorcerer and master of illusion, Nakano, an old friend of Connor’s mentor, Ramirez, who agrees to teach him how to wield the mighty kantana blade.
However, hoping to covet Nakano’s funky, reality bending powers is the evil Immortal known as Kane who, with his two henchmen, breach Nakano’s cave and beheads the magic user in order to absorb the wizard’s life force during that highly pyrotechnic light show known as the Quickening. However, even relieved of his head, Nakano has the last laugh because as Connor escapes, Kane and his flunkies are buried alive when some pre-set booby traps seal them in the cave tighter than the average Dwayne Johnson shirt.
Centuries pass, and after a fling with a noblewoman in 1788 France, we finally meet with Connor in the present day who has grown rather perplexed with his neverending existence. You see, after a car crash in 1987 that killed his latest love, McLeod found out that news of his becoming mortal after the death of the Kurgan was greatly exaggerated and that he’s still doomed to wander the world while aging slower than Paul Rudd.
However, raising his spirits is his adopted son Alex and the arrival on the scene of archaeologist Alexandra Johnson, who just happens to be the living spit of his lost French love from the 1700s, but this has to be weighed up against the fact that thanks to an archaeological dig, Kane has been set free and immediately sets about looking to sever Connor’s head as understandable payback for being put on the shelf for hundreds of years.
It has to be said that Highlander III probably is a better movie than Highlander II, but if you were to ask me why, I’m genuinely uncertain how to actually make that argument. I mean, I have theory why this movie feels like an improvement over a sequel so chaotically messy, it’s a miracle that anything Highlander managed to grow in its wake. Firstly, the sequel had to follow the stylistically deranged original that, to this day, still stands tall as the epitome of 80s cult phantasmagoria thanks to some unrestrained direction, an unfeasibly cool concept, Clancy Brown’s unhinged villain and the eccentric casting of Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery as a Scot and an Egyptian respectively, regardless of their accents. However, Highlander III has to follow a movie generally regarded as one of the worst sequels of all time, that n upheaved established continuity and brought Connery back from the dead for mid-film reasons I’m still a little fuzzy on. In comparison, the third film – on paper, anyways – is a far more faithful follow up that delivers a far more Highlandery plot than aliens and sky eco-trouble that plays like a cheap-jack Blade Runner. Delving into random flashbacks throughout the ages has always been more of Highlander’s bag anyways and the movie even throws in a subplot that harkens back to the parts of the first film that had New York cops think that a head-cleaving serial killer is on the loose – hell, even the rather convoluted plot that sees three Immortals taken out of the great game by being entombed alove sort of works in the franchise’s goofy flavour.
However, while logic has never really been one of Highlander’s strong points, this is where all the good news runs out and while it’s predecessor was a bad Highlander sequel because it fucked with the rules, this one ends up tanking because it’s just plain bad even while it follows the rules. Firstly, the plot is just a fucking mess that never actually pins down what it wants to do or say at any given moment. Seemingly realising that simply having Mario Van Peebles’ kinky, whore frequenting villain chase our hero for about an hour and a half, the script throws in strange curveballs that end up being more distracting than anything. Take the random thread that sees McLeod shot in a mugging and then taken to a hospital where he is thrown into a mental ward after freaking out after resurrecting. From there he eventually escapes thanks to a man who believes himself to Napoleon and the whole scene is so divorced from anything else in the rest of the film, I genuinely believed there for a minute that I’d dozed off and dreamt it.
Elsewhere, you’d think that after a couple of go rounds of playing this immortal Scot with a French accent, Lambert would find comfort in waving a sword around for old times sake, but instead the actor seems fairly lost, and that probably has something to do with the fact that the film has no idea what to do with him. One minute he’s lamenting his continued immortality, the next he’s dodging murder accusations. He’s a single father to an adopted son that somehow has almost no impact on the plot, even after the kid gets kidnapped and his across-the-rivers-of-time romance with the forever arched eyebrows of Deborah Kara Unger is about as engrossing as time-lapse photography of drying cement.
While all these storylines cancel each other out into oblivion, its down to Mario Van Peebles to enter the pantheon of obnoxiously overacting Highlander villains with black bile dripping from his teeth and sporting a plethora of bodily piercings and tattoos before it was cool. He certainly looks the part and he’s certainly having fun, but his rasping voice sounds like he’s doing a vocal aproximation of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget and despite the fact that the film can’t seem to remember if he’s able to conjure actual magic or just illusions, he regrettably falls more in the Michael Ironside/Katana pile than the Clancy Brown/Kurgan one.
While Russell Mulcahy’s original movie was about as visually restrained as the Notting Hill Carnival, director Andy Morahan decides to shoot the entire film like he’s crafting a dream sequence for an 80s Nightmare On Elm Street sequel – in fact, this becomes almost almost a literal thing when both Connor and Kane stage their final battle in a humongous boiler room/factory that’s drenched in so much red lighting, you’d genuinely believe they’d rented it from Freddy Krueger for the privilege and I simply can’t forgive a movie that un-ironically utilises a fucking trampoline during one of their messy fight scenes.
Worse, better, or just equally bad in a completely different way, Highlander III is yet another low point for a franchise that already should have changed its catch phrase from “There Can On Be One”, to “One Was Enough”.
Lowlander…
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