Why I Hate Conan, and So Should You by Danika Klyve, NMTV Conan the Barbarian is beautifully shot, with some fantastic audio editing and mixing, and it still might be one of the worst movies of the year. Allow me to summarize: Horrible dialogue, far too much pointless nudity, the writers use “magic” to explain away plot holes, the movie starts horribly, and just about everyone dies. Now I will expound.
Horrible dialogue. Conan’s most memorable line from the movie is probably “I live, I love, I slay, and I am content.” Not to say that Jason Momoa couldn’t be a good actor in something, someday, but in this case he was cast because he’s pretty and quite muscular. Momoa comes out with some decently menacing facial expressions, but Oscar-winning script material, this is not. Pointless nudity. For reasons none other than that men like topless ladies, there are multiple scenes where a number of women are mostly nude. At first I thought it was because they were slaves, but no. Even after being set free by Conan the Super-Hunk, this plethora of women continue to party with Conan and posse sans clothing. There are at least 7 people in this movie credited as nothing else than “Topless Wench.” Magic. We learn that there is a magic mask somewhere in the kingdom. But the mask is to magic for one person to possess, so a number of tribe broke the mask and each kept a section. (Cough cough. One ring to rule them all.) The plot of this story is that some evil guy is trying to recreate this magic mask, and conquering different tribes to get their chunk. And his daughter is a witch. This witch-daughter can just create sand-people to fight on their behalf. But after one sand-person is slain, and crumbles into sand, he can sometimes come back to an animate state. Sometimes not. It’s hard to be certain. Beginning of film. I knew I should have left the theatre by the time the title sequence began. The opening scene, narrated by a Morgan Freeman impersonator, starts with a topless woman being cut up. The second scene is a huge battle sequence in which Conan’s father plunges a sword into his wife stomach to cut out the baby so she can meet her son before she dies of her battle wounds. Note: it is not a dainty or surgical cut into her midsection, but a straight-up sword plunge. She promptly names him Conan, and dies. Just about everyone dies.
Anyway it’s awful. Maybe some teenage boys will enjoy the violence and nudity, but I doubt most people will. The movie feels about 3 times as long as its 112 minute running time. It drags on with a limited revenge plot, mixed in with a little bit of strange barn sex. The only thing that could have made watching this movie worse is if I would have seen it in 3D. 1 of out 5 stars.