When a franchise loses it’s way as much as the Highlander movies have, you often find yourself being quite surprised about how far the series has actually gone – for example, before looking into the immortal adventures of the McLeod clan, I actually had no idea that there actually was a fifth installment that was solely dedicated to Adrian Paul’s Duncan McLeod from the TV spin-off.
However, upon digging a little deeper, I found out why I was completely unaware of its existence and for a start, it was created as a TV movie for the Syfy channel as the first part of a proposed trilogy to give the show a belated big finish, but the reception for it was so bad that even David Abramowitz, the producer of Highlander: The Series, refused to accept it a cannon and instead described it merely as a bad dream that Duncan had had.
But as damning a put down as that is, is the Highlander’s final swing of the feature length sword really that bad?
Well, it’s bad enough that the series needs decapitating as soon as possible, yes.
In the near future, mankind has fallen into the kind of dystopian chaos that usually requires Snake Plissken to navigate it, but instead of Kurt Russell’s eyepatched anti-hero, we find glum immortal Duncan McLeod mooching around the remains of civilisation saving the occasional girl from rapey cannibals (surely the worst kind of cannibal). He’s feeling extra depressed, not because mankind has become a raging dumpster fire, but because his wife left him because Immortals are infertile and she really wanted babies. While we take a moment to adjust to this striking lack of priorities (uh, the earth is burning, guys), we’re introduced to is disparate group of Immortals who have just discovered strange goings on in the universe that may signify that the Source of Immortality is coming to earth, possibly to save everything. But when one of their number is slaughtered by a monstrous assailant while making this discovery, the group, made up of the ancient Methos, computer hacker Reggie and Cardinal Giovanni who represents the Vatican, decide to head out and intercept it when it arrives, but to do that, they’ll need the help of a despondent McLeod.
However, after ex-Watcher and old friend, Joe Dawson, manages to track Duncan down, they too are attacked by that mysterious marauder we saw earlier. He reveals himself as the Guardian of the Source, a gibbering, ghostly white killing machine that has the ability to jack up the speed of the film – no, sorry, wait… super speed and his attack is what finally galvanizes Duncan to join this quest for salvation. However, making things super-awkward is that Duncan’s wife, Anna, has become a conduit for visions that will lead them to the Source and thus has to tag along too. With continued attacks from the Guardian and their immortality gradually fading the closer they get to their goal – who will finally become “The One”?
In a multitude of ways, the Highlander sequels were much like the Immortals themselves as they tended to amble around aimlessly, vastly outlive their usefulness and, by a certain point, practically begging for a well-placed blade to the neck to end their misbegotten existence – well wait no longer, because that long overdue decapitation finally arrived courtesy of Lawnmower Man director, Brett Leonard, whose woeful final chapter cleaved effortlessly through flesh and neck bone to give the franchise the Quickening we’ve all been hoping for ever since Highlander II came out in 1991.
However, let’s focus on the positives first – mostly because it’ll be quick – and despite looking like a lot of other movies out there (the future alternates between looking like an Underworld movie, the Neil Marshall’s Doomsday and the Days Of Future Past bits of X-Men: The Last Stand) The Source actually looks far better than a direct to SyFy movie has any right to and anyone who saw the channel’s Lake Placid sequels will most likely agree. Also, adding a more overt, fantastical aspect to the franchise by dropping in quests, a mystical bad guy and an exposition dropping Elder, it’s probably the the most fantasy orientated entry since the third which featured Mario Van Peebles as a reality tinkering magician. While the original movie wasn’t huge on fully pushing the fantasy element beyond Immortals who spout lightning once their noggin comes off, the fact that this movie features a fellowship-style group of Immortals does manage to set the fifth installment aside from the others in a way that feels sort of new new.
However, feeling sort of new is the least of Highlander: The Source’s problems, because all of its magical fuckery, it ends up just feeling as dopey and cack handed as all the past three sequels have done. Is it better or worse than the bottom of the Highlander barrel? Tough to say, but it’s certainly the most recent and the turgid plotting, questionable acting and annoying characters all conspire to not so much be Highlander, as you’d to be high(lander) to get much out of this mess.
For a start, the film can’t seem to go more than a few minutes with throwing in annoying bursts of that glitchy editing that was infuriatingly popular during the 00s, but only made it seem like the movie has a severe bodily tic, and yet as grindingly irritating as it is, Leonard doubles down on the timing presumably because the rest of the flick is missing any semblance of life. Elsewhere, Adrian Paul struggles to maintain his dignity while surrounded by a strange ensemble who are made up of bored looking members of the TV cast and a string of new characters, such as the token hacker character (here overwhelmingly cockney and spouting lines like “This is outside the laws of celestial mechanics!’ like it’s a perfectly normal thing to say) and the highly strung and religious Giovanni, who weirdly resembles Matt Smith cosplaying La Roux.
Still, at least these guys all manage to keep their characters together – Cristian Solimeno on the other hand becomes the latest Highlander villain to try and out-Kurgan Clancy Brown and only ends up embarrassing themselves instead. Caked in white paint and wearing the type of clothes that would go down a storm for a Silent Hill villain, the character mistakes cinematic insanity for doing a poor-man’s Jim Carrey routine as he switches accents and quotes popular culture (including Queen lyrics), while his ludicrous fight scenes with Paul are rendered almost incomprehensible by some truly atrocious “speedster” effects.
Matters are well and truly torpedoed by a lousy script that not only bombard you with lazy plot devices (surely Duncan would have told his wife he’s infertile before they married) and an absolutely idiotic climax that has people spinning in place like the Tasmanian Devil one minute and trying to riff on 2001 the next and all I can say is that the inevitable reboot better not pull any shit like this or it’ll only further go to prove that when it comes to good Highlander movies, there can be only one.
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