Please, Can There Be Only One Now?
As anyone who has followed the Star Trek movie
franchise has seen, a television show's transition to
film is rather like puberty, awkward and confusing and
prone to identity crises. Should the producers assume
that the audience is familiar with the source material
and simply proceed, or should valuable screen time be
used to bring the incognoscenti up to speed? How far
can they go with the freedom afforded by a paying
audience to show skin and blood and use naughty words
without compromising the relationship between beloved
characters and devoted fans? Are films based on TV
series actually films or just kids wearing Dad's
pants?
The Highlander series has these problems and more,
being first a film franchise that started well and
then went suddenly sickeningly wrong, then a
syndicated TV show, and now again a film property.
Moreover, the underlying concept behind it all — a
global race of immortals locked in combat since the
beginning of time — lends itself so easily to story
and backstory permutations that the Highlander
mythos has become a huge, convoluted tapestry that
only the most hardcore fans can follow. Highlander: Endgame makes a valiant effort at cleaning things up,
presumably to hand the films over to Adrian Paul (star
of the TV series, whose producers, Davis/Panzer
Productions, are at the helm here), but in the end
it's just too massive a job. Nice fight scenes,
though.
Following the murder of his most recent mortal
companion, Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert, whose
French mouth continues to wrestle with his Scottish
accent) has dropped out of the Great Contest and opted
to exist among other immortal conscientious objectors
in a Sanctuary, locked into a sensory-deprivation
apparatus. Unable to respond to the immortals'
visceral need to fight, all Connor can do is have
expository flashbacks, such as the one where his
mother was burned as a witch — for having a son who
comes back from the dead — by his best friend, Jacob
Kell (Bruce Payne), an acolyte. There is a nice fight
scene as, enraged by grief, Connor mows down many of
his fellow villagers, including Kell's mentor, an
unarmed priest.
Cut back to the present, where a group of rogue
immortals invade the Sanctuary, decapitating everyone
within — the only way to kill an immortal —
including, presumably, Connor MacLeod. The abrupt
death of so many immortals at once disturbs Connor's
cousin Duncan (Paul) and sends him on a quest to find
Connor. He goes to Connor's sanctum behind the
wreckage of his antique shop — prime Manhattan real
estate that has remained miraculously untouched — and
is attacked by the same band of rogues, including his
immortal ex-wife Kate (now called Faith, played by
Lisa Barbuscia), who are led by an
also-happens-to-be-immortal Jacob Kell. A very nice
fight scene follows. A few flashbacks, a startlingly
coincidental five minutes, and a so-so fight scene
later, we learn that Kell wants ultimate power and
revenge against Connor, Kate/Faith wants revenge
against Duncan, Connor wants to redeem his soul, and
Duncan wants the plot to make sense. Or, barring
that, some more fight scenes.
We're with Duncan all the way. This film shouldn't
have to work as hard as it does. Is it really
necessary that this story contain this much sturm und
drang just because it's a film and not TV? Of
course not — there's enough substance in any one of
Endgame's subplots to drive the picture, and if the
object is to clean things up, why manufacture new mud?
For example, exactly why is Connor supposed to suffer
when Kell, being immortal himself, should have
realized that he murdered Connor's mother unjustly?
Because Kell is ee-vil as only a TV supervillain can
be, and Bruce Payne chews scenery by the stack to get
this point across. In the end, all of the plot
convolutions, the sudden appearance of murdered
mothers and lost loves, Connor's existential
breast-beating, and a parade of flashbacks is
superfluous — Connor and Duncan must join forces to
defeat Kell simply because he's just too powerful and
ee-vil to go on. It's that simple, and half of the
film could have been eliminated in favor of that
point, leaving room for more fight scenes.
This is not to say the film is unwatchable. Both Paul
and Lambert are appealing leads and in the series of
flashbacks that illustrate the depth of their
characters' mutual affection over the centuries, the
actors have real chemistry. And yes, there are the
fight scenes, wonderfully choreographed by Donnie Yen.
A martial artist by vocation, Paul is fluid and
dynamic, almost balletic, when he's fighting. The
swordplay has always been central to both the films
and the TV show, and this film hits its stride when
characters are trying to kill each other. It's just
when they talk, argue, have sex, or otherwise
participate in the present-day plot in any way that
everything gets dreary.
The bottom line is that Highlander: Endgame should
be a lot more fun than it is. Freed from the grind of
producing twenty-two episodes a season and the
limitations of time and content proscribed by the
television medium, the talents behind this new phase
of the franchise, if that's what it is, should be
using this opportunity to streamline the mythos, not
pile on old baggage. The saga of the immortals has
legs, as they say, but it'll run further and faster
with the irons off.
