Highlander (1986)

There can be only one. And a couple of sequels. And a TV series. And a remake.

Elevator Pitch

The eponymous Highlander is Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), a sixteenth century Scottish clansman, who miraculously recovers from a mortal wound. The flamboyant Ramirez (Sean Connery) reveals to him that they are both members of a mysterious group of immortals who can only be killed by having their heads cut off. Now the immortals are gathering in ‘80s New York for a decapita-thon in which the last one with an intact noggin will win the nebulously defined ‘Prize’. All of which has attracted the attention of the NYPD, even as MacLeod must face the most fearsome of all the immortals, The Kurgan (Clancy Brown). Because, as the poster says: “There can be only one.”

It is somewhat ironic that Highlander uses decapitation as a plot element, because it is a film best enjoyed without a brain.

Quentin Tarantino has coined a meta genre he calls ‘the hang out movie’: one in which the core appeal is hanging out with the characters. In some movies — such as any film by Jim Jarmusch, or Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) — the depiction of ‘hanging out’ is pretty much the whole film. But a ‘hang out’ movie can fall in any genre; Tarantino was specifically talking about Howard Hawks’’s Western Rio Bravo (1959). Tarantino’s own Pulp Fiction (1994) is a ‘hang out’ movie.

Highlander is a subtly different kind of ‘hang out’ movie, though; it’s the kind of movie you put on while hanging out. It was made in the VHS era, when you could put films on in the background while you played with action figures and recited the catchphrase dialogue. It is perfect for projecting on a blank wall in a hipster dive bar at 2 in the morning, so that the drunks can get hysterical about the OTT sequence that follows the first decapitation: cars in a parking lot rhythmically bumping up and down, a hose unfurling in a tumescent burst of froth, and Christopher Lambert moaning orgasmically. (This is referred to as ‘The Quickening’, a medieval term for the first sense a woman has of pregnancy, which should give you some idea of the adolescent Freudian stew involved.)

Highlander is an emblematic Hollywood popcorn flick, all hot air and explosions, too much sugar and too much salt. It is a high concept movie in which superficially ‘cool’ concepts are arranged in a vast and teetering pile, until everyone involved is dizzy and nauseous with altitude sickness. In no particular order, it confronts the viewer with a rain-slicked and neon ‘80s New York; Japanese katanas; swordfights in back alleys; smart, world weary cops; Highland battles in the bagpipe-skirling mists; Dutch angles and frenetic editing; Queen; Christopher Lambert’s slow and wonky smile; and Sean Connery’s eyebrows.

As with its VHS inheritance, Highlander belongs to the era of music videos; the director Russell Mulcahy made his name directing Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ and Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ and, perhaps most pertinently, The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, the video that launched MTV. It has been designed to work like a music video; its visuals are an accompaniment to something else. Not music (although Queen wrote songs for the soundtrack), but the viewer’s own imagination.

It is a vibe movie, and the vibe is ‘what a teenage boy thinks is cool’.

Delights

All of which, on rewatch, made me wonder why I had loved it so much back in 1986. Sure, I had been a Queen fan, but by 1986 I was starting to drift away from them because they seemed so uncool: mainstream music for stadium-rocking dads. And, admittedly, I was a Christopher Lambert fan, having already seen him in Subway (1985). But while Subway -- a product of the ‘80s French ‘cinema du look’ -- is a very shallow film, it is the Mariana Trench compared to Highlander.

The very shallowness of the film, the fact that it is little more than a vibe, is part of its appeal. Of course, I wasn’t immune to the swords and sorcery, the mean streets of gritty Manhattan, the sheer velocity and chutzpah of Mulcahy’s hyperactive directions. But all that high concept -- the secret society of immortals, the head lopping, the ‘Prize’ -- could easily have turned into an indigestible slop of exposition and lore. Sure, it opens with a voiceover, which is always a bad sign: someone, while viewing an edit, said ‘wait, what?’ and demanded that an explanation be included.

But it doesn’t need it. Highlander, very wisely, doesn’t care. It knows that it’s all just an excuse for the cool bits. No one watching this cares where the immortals come from; they just want to see swordfights. It is notable that the sequel, which did try and expound on the mythology, is widely considered to be one of the worst films of all time.

Disappointments

This is a film in which Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman who couldn’t speak English when filming started, plays a Scot. Sean Connery, a Scot who has never once attempted any accent other than his own, plays an Egyptian with a Spanish name. Clancy Brown, an American, plays an ancient steppe warrior named after a kind of burial mound. This film is not just stupid on the surface; it is stupid all the way down, through the script, the idea, the casting, the production and the motivation. Its stupidity is the only deep thing about it.

But it’s not malicious; it is gleeful, boyish. It is stupidly fun. Stupidly entertaining. Maybe even stupidly cool.

Can We Show The Kids?

So, here’s the thing: you don’t have to. You can just wait for the remake. Yes, a remake, starring Henry Cavill, Dave Batuista and Russell Crowe, is being remade right now. It is directed by Chad Stahelski, the man behind the John Wick movies. Which are, not incidentally, an artisanal blend of the very stupid and the very cool.

Which rather begs the question:

Why Are They Remakering This?

Well, for the same reason they’ve just made yet another sequel to Tron (1982), the same reason they’re making a new adaption of the toy-line-turned-Saturday-morning-cartoon Masters of the Universe (1983--85), and the same reason the Star Wars will continue until morale improves.

Like John Favreau (the man behind The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)) and Travis Knight (the director of Masters of the Universe (2026)), Chad Stahelski is Gen X. Our generation is now ‘in charge’ (for a given value of ‘in charge’; obviously, we’re not competent to run a major government or anything) and is busily revisiting our childhoods. Boomers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg recreated the Flash Gordon and Rider Haggard adventures they had adored as kids and gave us the Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and now we, in turn, are remaking them. We might be lazy and feckless, but on the other hand, we’re entirely artistically derivative.

Those ‘70s and ‘80s blockbusters created the ‘four quadrant’ model: a massively expensive blockbuster with something for everyone, and nothing of substance for anyone. But there was another model: the stupid VHS cult hit. Highlander was distributed by Cannon, the production-house-cum-financial-shenanigan that was a prolific creator of thick-eared nonsense to be rented from Blockbuster on a rainy afternoon: like Cannon’s original adaptation of Masters of the Universe (1987), Highlander was a commercial flop that was re-rented, rewound and rewatched over and over again.

Now, the mainstream cinema of the twenty-first century is a mixture of event movie and enjoyable genre trash: endless brand-extending multiverses of imponderable lore and impenetrable visual effects. There is not much that distinguishes Highlander from a mediocre Marvel movie. The technology has improved; beyond the windows of Connor Macleod’s apartment in Highlander there is an absolutely awful backdrop photo of Manhattan, while a Marvel movie will have a slightly unconvincing CGI rendering, and costume design, fight choreography and scriptwriting have improved immensely.

But while Marvel movies have resources that Russell Mulcahy could only dream of, these are, basically, the same film over and over again. A vaguely drawn McGuffin; a bunch of one-dimensional characters; some lumpy plot mechanics; and, most importantly, a huge pile of ‘cool’ stuff with which to overwhelm the viewer. When they said ‘there can be only one’, it turns out they meant there could be only one kind of film.

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There were some slightly more successful high-concept action flicks in 1986, most notably Top Gun: