highlander 2
Whaddup with Highlander 2? I mean, what happened here? I’m not the hugest fan of the first in the series, but you have to admire it for its original story, its cinematography, and its breadth. Yet part two is a disaster. Of course, many sequels are disasters, but — oh sweet Moses, this is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Not only is all the dialogue cringe-worthy, but the story doesn’t even make sense. It fails the simplest of water-holding tests. So Lambert and Connery are aliens, and they knew each other on the planet Zeiss before heading to earth, where they either forgot about their friendship entirely, or pretended they didn’t know each other for the entire first film. And the immortal/mortal thing just gets shot to shit. Perennial villain Michael Ironside appears in the “500 years ago on the planet Zeiss” scene as some sort of desert warlord. Now, they’re apparently not supposed to be immortal until they get to earth. Yet, 500 years later, he flies down to earth for the Lambert grudge match they didn’t mention anything about time travel, did they? And, as an alien warlord enjoying his first earth-visit, he already knows all sorts of action tag-lines – “this is the last stop” after trashing a train, “put it on my tab” after trashing a cab. And MacLeod and Ramirez are called MacLeod and Ramirez on their home planet! What sort of alien names are those? What happened to good old Zor and Ungar-9 and all that shit? “Hi, I’m Jennifer Smith, an alien from beyond time.” Finally, why would Lambert help design an ozone shield for the planet? He was a fucking antique dealer in the last film! Is the global shield made out of brass and pewter?
So many questions… so many. It comes down to this: it’s inconceivable that even the dumbest halfwit mountain people could come up with a script so horribly bad, but this piece of villainy was brought about by the creators of the original: same director, writers, producers. And why the fuck did Connery sign on? Stu theorizes that Russel Malcahy deliberately tried to ruin the film, since he never wanted to make the sequel in the first place. But why would he sign on? Elsewhere I read that partway through shooting the bad producers/distributors took the thing away from the good producers and massacred it. Some explanation may be found on this new DVD. It’s an extended director’s cut, with deleted and even reshot scenes, that abandons the alien storyline. Apparently Malcahy et all explain what happened, what they originally intended, blah blah. Anyone seen it and care to tell me?