The short version: The fifth Highlander feature film, recently released directly to DVD, wasn’t as bad as I expected.

It was worse.

Much, much, much worse.

It was worse than either Star Trek V or Highlander 2, long the benchmarks for movie sequel suckage.

It was so bad it left The Girlfriend curled into a fetal ball, whimpering inconsolably.

It was so abysmally, eye-gougingly, soul-grindingly bad, in fact, that this fanboy is now finished with the whole god-forsaken franchise, at least as far as new Highlander product goes. I’m not quite incensed enough to disavow the original movie and the TV series, both of which I still enjoy, but in the highly unlikely event any further Highlander movies get made, I won’t be wasting any more of my precious, limited, mortal lifespan on them. Because when it comes right down to it, I’m just not that masochistic.

The long version follows, if you’re interested in reading any more of my rantings on this subject, but I think the important point has been made…

And now here’s the long version:

The original Highlander movie really shouldn’t have had any sequel, let alone four sequels plus a TV series. Actually, two TV series if you count the short-lived spin-off from the spin-off, Highlander: The Raven. Which I don’t, because it sucked. But that’s another blog entry. Oh, and then there was that equally short-lived cartoon set in the distant, post-apocalyptic future… but only five people on the entire planet remember that thing, and I doubt if any of them besides me are reading this blog…

Anyway, Highlander 1 (for clarity’s sake) was pretty much self-contained; when it was over, so was the story. Our protagonist, Connor MacLeod, was the last of his immortal kind; the final battle had been fought, the enemy vanquished, and the wondrous and magical Prize finally won. Presumably, Connor would now go off, find happiness, and use The Prize — whatever it actually was, which wasn’t entirely clear — to help mankind achieve world peace or something. The last frame of the movie shows Connor smiling at his lady-love Brenda, his brooding days finally behind him for good.

Or at least that’s how it would have gone if home video had never been invented. H1 was a dud at the U.S. box office, but gradually became enough of a cult hit on video that the film’s producers started thinking about ways to “extend the brand.” What they finally came up with was Highlander 2: The Quickening, a film rightly reviled by fans and civilians alike as a baffling mess.

H1 was set in the here and now, with flashbacks to historical Scotland. Despite the far-out premise of immortals who fought with swords in dark alleyways and absorbed each other’s life-energy — an event known as the Quickening, for you non-fans — it was relatively realistic, or at least it looked realistic. It was unquestionably taking place in our world. (Now that I think about it, H1 could be seen as a forerunner of the urban fantasy sub-genre that is currently flourishing.)

H2, on the other hand, is very definitely not happening in our world. It takes place in a dark, Blade Runner-esque near-future dystopia where the world is ruled by an evil corporation and everyone inexplicably drives 1940s automobiles (the “now” setting); instead of historical flashbacks, we get a few scenes set on another planet called Zeist (a.k.a. “the dread planet Zeist” among Highlander fans who found this mess impossible to swallow). According to this film, the immortals are actually aliens, you see, rebels who were sentenced to eternal exile here on Earth — which is in Zeist’s future, by the way — by the evil lord they tried to overthrow. Zeistian technology apparently enables instantaneous time-and-space travel and cellular manipulation to produce immortality, but these aliens still ride horses, dress as S&M barbarians, and fight with swords. Oh, and they also have Back to the Future-style hoverboards, just for kicks. As a confused Virginia Madsen tries to explain it, “you’re mortal there (Zeist), but you’re immortal here until you kill all the guys from there who’ve come here, and then you’re mortal here.”

Got all that? Don’t worry, no one else understood it either. H2 has long been a bad joke among Highlander fans and movie buffs generally — for example, I once saw a chart of “movie suckitude” that used H2 as its baseline — and Peter Davis and Bill Panzer, the producers behind the franchise, seemed to have learned their lesson when they went on to create Highlander: The Series. The TV series wisely abandoned the science-fictional tone of H2 and returned to the urban fantasy formula of the original movie; it was solidly set in the here-and-now with flashbacks to actual historical periods, just like H1. In the series, the events of H1 were retconned into just an ordinary battle between immortals (as opposed to The Final Battle), and all mention of Zeist was thankfully forgotten. But while everyone else was content to accept that immortals simply were, with no further explanation necessary or desired, Davis and Panzer just couldn’t get past the idea that they had to somehow reveal the origins of our heroes. They continued to talk about it at conventions and in interviews, and I long ago lost track of how many re-edits and DVD re-issues there are of their first failed sequel movie.

Which brings us, at long last, to Highlander: The Source, the fifth feature film to bear the title Highlander, and the second to take place (arguably) in the revised timeline of Highlander: The Series. (There were, of course, two other movie sequels before this one, but they’re not really germane to this particular rant. They’ll get theirs in some other entry…) As the title suggests, The Source is another attempt to figure out where the immortals come from… at least, I assume that’s what it’s about. The script is so unbelievably inept that no one in the movie ever actually gets around to explaining what this bloody Source that everyone is so eager to find actually is.

But I’m racing ahead of myself again.

Highlander: The Source — which The Girlfriend thinks ought to be retitled Highlander: The Suck, and who am I to dispute her wisdom? — takes place in some unidentified near-future in which, as a helpful voiceover at the beginning informs us, the world is falling apart. Improbably, all the planets in the universe are leaving their orbits and lining up in a conjunction of unprecedented scale. And a group of immortals that includes Methos, a popular secondary character from the TV series, is seeking the legendary Source. Why? What do they need or want it for? Dunno, we’re never exactly told, but it’s apparently important, or so the inept script would have us believe. To find it, they require the help of Duncan MacLeod, the television Highlander (an immortal kinsman of Connor MacLeod from H1), who is sulking in a grotty Eastern European city somewhere because his wife left him. The wife he apparently met, married, and lost in between Highlander: Endgame, the last movie, and this one. A character we longtime fans have never heard of, but who is the person doing the voiceover. And why isn’t Joe Dawson, Duncan’s mortal Watcher,* doing the voiceover, as he did on the TV series? Well, because Anna the ex-wife is significant, you see. In fact, she’s more significant to the quest than Duncan is, because she’s having visions that somehow connect to The Source, and the immortal questors will need her to lead them to the thing. Oh, and besides, Joe isn’t going to survive to the end of the movie anyhow. Lucky him.

Can you see yet what a longtime Highlander fan like myself might find objectionable about this movie? Besides the fact that everything about it is just plain dumb? Consider the set-up: a dismal near-future dystopia… bizarre and silly cosmic events that really have nothing to do with anything, just to lend some would-be epic sci-fi flavor… a sulky hero who isn’t behaving like the character we thought we knew… sound familiar? Yep, it’s Highlander 2 all over again. Except that, compared to The Suck, H2 was downright competent.

As I already mentioned, the script is a complete mess. There is virtually no characterization to speak of — the new characters who weren’t in the TV series exist only as cannon fodder to be whittled down one by one, and the familiar characters quite simply don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. Methos is particularly problematic; one of the oldest of the immortals, he was portrayed on the series as a cynic who is interested in his own survival above all other things. He prefers to keep a low profile so as not to attract a fight and only reluctantly gets involved in anything because of MacLeod’s idealism. He is the last character you would expect to embark on a semi-religious quest for an unexplained artifact that, as we’re repeatedly told, most immortals don’t even believe in. And here, he is the one urging Mac to get involved. It’s just wrong.

MacLeod is wrong, too, though not as grievously as Methos. We’ve seen him broody and withdrawn before (although it was mostly in the later seasons of the series that I didn’t particularly care for). The big problem with his character is the fact that he’s suddenly got a mortal ex-wife that never existed prior to this film. Granted, we don’t know how much time has passed since we last saw him, but it can’t have been too much time since everyone is driving 2007-vintage automobiles. In the series, Duncan was very cautious with love, since one of the primary problems of immortality is outliving one’s mate. He wouldn’t have leaped into anything, and he would’ve told Anna the facts — i.e., that he’ll outlive her and that he can’t father children — long before they actually tied the knot. It’s all very dramatic that she left him because he couldn’t give her a baby — although, as The Girlfriend pointed out, they’re living in Eastern Europe, where it shouldn’t be all that hard to find an orphan to adopt, so Anna was obviously a selfish twit — but it’s just not right because the real Duncan, the one from the TV series, wouldn’t have allowed things to get to that point. Anna would’ve gone into marriage knowing exactly what the score was.

(I suppose you could argue that the TV series is the TV series and this movie ought to be judged on its own terms and not by how well it ties in with another property. But the script is so lousy at establishing back story or motivation or even sympathy for these characters that the only people who could possibly be interested in what they’re doing are fans of the TV series, and, as I’ve just noted, The Suck isn’t going to satisfy us either.)

The bad guy in The Suck is at least an original creation instead of just another variant on H1’s barbarian lunatic, The Kurgan, as previous movie sequels have given us, but that’s about all I can say about him. The Guardian, who looks a bit like one of Clive Barker’s Cenobites, was once another immortal pilgrim who long ago actually found The Source, but instead of getting… whatever it is you get from The Source, he was changed, given the power of super-speed so it’s nearly impossible to fight him, and now (apparently) exists only to keep others away from The Source. Why? Who knows? As one can expect from this boneheaded waste of filmmaking resources, we’re not given any good reason. We don’t know a damn thing about this creature or why he does what he does, or why The Source made him run around like the Flash instead of killing him or making him human or whatever it’s supposed to do. Kurgan was crazy, but we kind of understood him, and he had a weird charisma about him. He was fun to watch. The Guardian is mysterious to the point of being utterly opaque, and his one-liners are neither clever nor memorable. He may as well be a zombie avatar in a video game — he is simply the Bad Guy.

The original Highlander had a sort of weary grandeur to it, and the TV series a sincere humanism and an interest in ethics. These earlier incarnations of the franchise, as outlandish as they may seem to the uninitiated, were really about something. The Suck isn’t about anything except action and spectacle, and it fails even on that count because it is so incredibly cheap-looking. I mean, it’s really amateurish. The visual style is the same gloomy, irritating herky-jerky jitteriness that I associate with recent horror films, that thing that looks like three or four frames of film are missing for every dozen. The fight scenes are uninspired and incoherent, and the final battle between Duncan and The Guardian — well, let’s just say that the sweded version of Star Wars didn’t embarrass me as much as that awful, cartoony, laughably bad scene.

I’ve long believed that Davis/Panzer hoped to build Highlander into a big money-making franchise with lots of ancillary tie-ins, another Star Trek, but they just weren’t smart enough to pull it off. Instead of recognizing what it was that really worked in the original film, and later in the TV series, they became fixated on the idea of placing our heroes in an ugly, hopeless sci-fi future, and on answering questions that no one was asking. Instead of balancing the premise’s admittedly melancholy center with some fun and good humor, as H1 and the best episodes of the series did, they allowed the brooding and gloomy elements to gradually take over and dominate the franchise. And, worst of all, they just didn’t know when to stop. Each trip back to the well was an exercise in diminishing returns. Now, sadly, the ridiculous incarnations of the premise far outnumber the good ones, the whole franchise is tainted with the stink of utter lameness, and I think we’ve probably seen the last of our secretive, world-weary princes of the universe. I’ll be amazed if another Highlander film somehow gets made, despite the rumors that The Suck was supposed to be the first of a trilogy, a reboot for the whole franchise. One of Kurgan’s more memorable lines in H1 was “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” but the mournful truth is that this property has crawled over into the corner and died without a sound.

And you know what? That’s fine by me. Really. I’ve had enough disappointment and frustration, enough thinking that this stuff could really be something if only the people in charge knew their rear ends from holes in the ground. I’ve got the first film and the four-and-a-half good seasons (out of six) of the TV series. Honestly, that’s all there ever should have been…

* In the TV series mythos, there is a secret society of mortals called Watchers who know of the immortals and their activities. They “observe and record, but never interfere.” Joe broke all the codes of the society by revealing himself to and befriending his assigned subject, Duncan MacLeod. Next to Duncan himself, Joe is probably my favorite character of the series.