Highlander (1986)
Directed by Russell Mulcahy
He fought his first battle on the Scottish Highlands in 1536. He will fight his greatest battle on the streets of New York City in 1986. His name is Connor MacLeod. He is immortal.
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What critics compared Highlander to
Nada hasta la fecha se compara con Highlander, incluso opacó la carrera de la eterna promesa Christopher Lambert.
There are many reasons why these mythic warriors would be morose about the constant decay around them or the sense of repetition in their lives without receiving any semblance of a purpose for why they’ve been “chosen,” but from “Tuck Everlasting” to Wolverine to those sword-wielding “Highlander” folks and everything in between, it’s always such drudgery.
So asked Freddie Mercury on the soundtrack to 1986’s Highlander , a film to which The Old Guard owes no small debt.
But Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Old Guard is something different, stranger, living somewhere between the existential brooding of Highlander and the tactical-porn precision of the John Wick films (or Theron’s previous dip into that style, Atomic Blonde ).
When it comes to the myth of immortality, the sweeping sentiments of Queen from the Highlander soundtrack say it best.
The good news is, The Old Guard is better than Highlander II — but that's true of literally every movie ever.
But that could also be that the lightning aspects just harkened back to Highlander for me.
Say what you will about the ’95 Mortal Kombat , but writer Kevin Droney ( Highlander TV series) understood that getting to know the karacters set up stakes so that the fights, ridiculous as they are, kontained weight.
But the garish lighting and focus on swordplay and hokum put it more in league with 90s cheapies like the Highlander TV series or, perhaps, the original Mortal Kombat films (I can’t say for sure as I’ve never seen them).
Digan lo que quieran sobre el Mortal Kombat del 95, pero el guionista Kevin Droney (la serie de televisión Highlander) entendía que conocer a los personajes ponía en juego lo necesario para que las peleas, por ridículas que fueran, tuvieran peso, en esta versión, las peleas son la pieza central, pero en su mayoría carecen de sentido, sobre todo por la forma en que la película establece los acontecimientos de la historia como el período previo al décimo torneo entre reinos.
Strands of Highlander (1986) rear their head too as we discover that an Infinite can only be “stopped” by a blow to the head in the form of a bullet that… uploads their mind to a digital prison in the cloud?
The backhanded compliment to his Scottish accent is that it’s better than Christopher Lambert’s attempts in the Highlander films.
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Even when he’s just lazily doing Sean Connery in Highlander and Richard Harris in almost everything, he is really just doing The Dude.
Jane, who speaks with the bizarre delivery of Highlander’s Christopher Lambert (he sounds poorly dubbed even though he isn’t), plays this broad vendetta of a character ramrod straight, which turns The Punisher into an overwrought, melodramatic comedy.
A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander , Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll.
Tarantino did it with more moxie in Kill Bill – a dollop of full-fat cinematic ice cream where our hero had a lot more to say than “yeah”, and Clancy Brown’s on hand this time to remind us that Highlander did it with greater humour and economy.
That’s just the first act of a story that then proceeds to borrow from spaghetti Westerns, the Hong Kong “golden age” and even Highlander .
And there’s the wonderful Clancy Brown, famous for his role as The Kurgan in “Highlander” and most recently seen in “Dexter: New Blood,” who joins the franchise as the Harbinger, a high-ranking member of the High Table who serves as the mediator in the film’s climax.
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Under the direction of Aussie Stephen Hopkins–who helmed A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 and filmed all the action sequences as second-unit director on Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander–the pieces come together for a horror/sci-fi gem that will please most action-oriented fans.
Just as Mulcahy's fun zero-budget debut Razorback was an Outback take on Jaws, Highlander is a less-poignant spin on The Terminator --a comparison that rings uncomfortably exact when the Kurgan stalks MacLeod's new girlfriend through her apartment to the strains of Michael Kamen's moody bass score.
Russell Mulcahy (The Shadow, the grungy and resourceful Razorback) seems a little lost in the budgetary richness of this 20th Century-Fox production from 1986; it plays like a lot of hyperkinetic three-minute movies stuck together, and you get the feeling that changing the order of the scenes wouldn't make a whole lot of difference to the narrative.