film, eyeballs, brain

When the DVD booklet warns you that the film you’re about to watch shouldn’t be thought of a sequel (despite the “2” in the title), but as “a totally new and different cinematic adventure starring the same exciting characters and a great new villain”, it should be fair warning, yes? And when you and two friends who should know better actually take time to watch Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander 2: Renegade Version — not to be confused, mind you, with Highlander 2: The Quickening, which Roger Ebert called “a movie almost awesome in its badness” — well. I’m glad I have good friends.

Russell Mulcahy obviously is not the lone music video director to cross over into commercial Hollywood films — that includes Mark Pellington, Steve Barron, Tamra Davis, McG, F. Gary Gray, Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and, best of the lot, David Fincher — but in the early days of MTV, Mulcahy was probably first out of the gate. And he was, after all, a trailblazer of sorts: his video for the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first to be broadcast on MTV when they turned on the switch.

The colorful Seijun Suzuki-style split screens in Spandau Ballet’s “True”, costumed partygoers slapping each other in Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”, the yacht in Duran Duran’s “Rio” crawling with painted models, Stevie Nicks twirling on the edge of a precipice in Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy”: Mulcahy’s visuals can be said, for better or worse, to have defined that generation of music videos just as Hype Williams would define his a decade later. (The block party that assembles for Billy Joel’s “A Matter of Trust” is totally improbable, but it might be, along with the Human League’s “Empire State Human”, Mulcahy’s best short-form work, at least of the ones I’ve seen.) His videos for Duran Duran, in particular, were integral to the band’s identity: filmed in exotic locales, with a whiff of perversity, and like “Miami Vice”, the embodiment of ’80s slick, with high production values that at least proved the record label’s money didn’t all disappear up the band’s noses. Not quite, anyway.

Mulcahy’s video for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” — a Jim Steinman-penned power-ballad beast of a song — is surely one of the iconic videos of that decade, right up there with “Billie Jean” and “Take On Me” (both, amazingly enough, directed by Steve Barron): all whipped-up Freudian froth, a nightmarish combination of The Innocents and Village of the Damned. It’s all glorious excess of a distinctly Eighties kind, Aqua Net deployed with Reaganite abandon, and laying a template of sorts for the 1986 Highlander.

But back to Highlander 2: Renegade Version. It’s a terrible, terrible movie. While Mulcahy’s original Highlander was no masterpiece (how it could have spawned an entire franchise is still beyond me), there’s always room in my movie-snob heart for the big, dumb, over-acted, effects-driven, sci-fi / fantasy flick that featured, as my friend Barb writes, “men killing men”.

At first I thought it was the screenwriters’ fault, really. (Not that I’m trying to defend Mulcahy’s work, but what looks like his common visual signature style — floodlights streaming through windows and blinds, mysterious puddles of water in every other scene, couture inspired by The Road Warrior — are at least all over the production. I always liked that elegant sweep of the camera across the stage in “The Reflex”, and Mulcahy uses it to great effect here during the fight sequences.)

First of all, the incomprehensible screenplay has the temerity to begin with a nod towards relevant social issues (the destruction of the ozone layer), though it’s not nearly as fatuous as Saw VI‘s hilariously gory take on the health care public option debate. Christopher Lambert — we didn’t hesitate to correct anyone mispronouncing it (“It’s KREES-tof Lamb-BEAAR!”) — former Immortal, is Connor MacLeod (“of the Clan MacLeod”), a now aging scientist who has created an enormous shield that protects the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. (Doubtless his facility with a sword for hundreds of years prepared him for massive engineering feats like the crimson Windows 3.1 screensaver that now lights up the Earth’s skies.)

Sean Connery returns as Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez, a Spaniard in a Scottish kilt, and an Immortal who had already been decapitated in the previous movie — oh wait, I’m not supposed to think of it as a sequel, so never mind. Ramirez ends up “dying” to save Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod a second time by preventing a ceiling fan with spikes from chopping off his Michael Bolton mane:

Okay, so there are a few indications that this is all intended as high camp. (The title “Somewhere over the Atlantic” appears when Ramirez rides an airplane for the first time; fifteen minutes later, we return to Ramirez with – well, see for yourself.)

But when Mulcahy and the producers gush about how the “Renegade Version” was closest to their “original vision”, I shudder at the thought of what the original monstrosity might have looked like; it makes me feel a sudden twinge of sympathy for Roger Ebert. But he at least got paid to write about it.

One of the main alterations, for instance, is a removal in the screenplay of all references to “the quickening”. That’s basically Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod on his knees in orgasmic rapture, shedding his old-age makeup, fake tendrils of electricity running across the screen, glass and curly locks flying everywhere. This makes little sense because it’s the money shot for the two films.

The other “improvement” is that Highlander 2: The Quickening reveals that the Immortals are from another planet altogether; Highlander 2: Renegade Version jettisons this perfectly fine explanation (they’re aliens, which is why they’re immortal!) by placing the Immortals on Earth, but “a very long time ago”, according to the intertitle. (This rather radical narrative shift in time-space is handled by the deletion of a speech by a judge sentencing Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod and Ramirez to exile on Planet Earth for their treason. We therefore get the full premise of the film delivered by an off-screen voice, exiling the two to the future instead. Which of course makes perfect sense.)

There’s a fine supporting cast here somewhere, but I can’t find them. The impossibly beautiful Virginia Madsen is initially convincing as Louise Marcus, a sleek eco-terrorist in a catsuit, but inexplicably transforms into blonde bimbo in a manner of minutes. (In the featurette, Mulcahy refers to the restored scene when she lets Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod fuck her against a wall seconds after she meets the newly young Connor as “hot”. Whatever you say, Russell.)

Michael Ironside, usually dependable as the unhinged bad guy, plays the absurdly named General Katana, who, to his credit, looks like he’s having the most fun, but comes across mostly as a third-rate Jack Nicholson — the Jack from Batman, not The Shining. John C. McGinley — the man clearly has a lock on every casting call for Officious Little Prick (and yes, I’m patting myself on the back for that literary reference) — is simply shrill and underused here. (McGinley actually has one of the more interesting roles, as the secretive CEO for the company that maintains the Shield — the secret being that the ozone layer has in fact already “repaired itself”. Don’t ask.)

This is not to say that Highlander 2: Renegade Version is unwatchable; the action sequences aren’t half bad, flying skateboards notwithstanding, and Connery seems clued in on the big joke in a way that Lambert (and alas, Mulcahy) aren’t. Watch it with good and patient friends, and preferably with Gigli and Meet The Spartans next on tap.

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