Highlander

This may be the most metal movie ever made. 

I want a van with The Kurgan killing Ramirez painted on one side and the final sword fight under the neon red Silverado sign on the other. 

That would be most awesome. 

Ok. let’s back up and talk about all the ways this movie is a heavy metal song brought to life. 

With a mix of present day scenes and flashbacks, the first half of the movie introduces us to Connor MacLeod, born in the highlands of Scotland in 1518 and he is still alive. 

Connor is presented as a mystery and a dangerous, deadly man. He’s is played in a sort of grimy glory by Christopher Lambert. That sense of danger is missing in most of the sequels and the TV show. But the movie really does suggest that an immortal warrior might cut off your head if you push him too far. 

There’s a scene where he has enough of some cops questioning him and tosses them around in a holding cell. Everybody in the station cheers. 

Anyway, the movie shifts to the past and every one of these scenes are magic. 

1) Connor dies in battle (killed by the flick’s big bad looking like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life) but he’s immortal so he comes back to life. 

2) The people in his village won’t have none of this obvious devilment in their town and they want to burn him alive but a town elder takes pity on him and settles for banishing him. And how amazing is it that the movie recognizes that anyone who is different is either going to get killed by small town folk or at the very least run out of town. 

3) Connor starts a small farm and marries a woman and lives away from people and enjoys his young marriage. He lives forever, she grows old and he loves her to her last day. It’s incredibly romantic in a movie that is mostly concerns with sweaty guys trying to decapitate each other. 

4) Sean (by God) Connery shows up wearing the most ostentatious outfit you have ever seen and announces that he is Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez and is the Chief Metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain. 

Ok this is taking too long. Let’s skip to the chorus. Short version Sean Connery mentors Connor, explains that they are both immortals and that there are rules. 

If your head comes away from your body you are dead. When you die there is a quickening which involves a bunch of lightning and screaming about power and is as sexual as it sounds. 

And eventually there will be a gathering of immortals in which everyone will have to fight and only one will remain. He will be given unlimited power. The movie is never too clear on how this part works even when it explains it in the final few minutes of the film. 

In the end, There Can Be Only One. 

So let’s point out a couple of things. 

First this movie does all of this, explains the rules, has plots involving multiple characters in the past and the present and hits nearly every moment in one hour and 50 minutes. 

And it just absolutely wails. No false notes, nothing that stands out as wrong even as I’m watching it decades later. 

Like, the movie takes the time to show you what happens when an immortal gets drunk and loses a duel … and then gets back up and loses again. 

It takes time to at least suggest that Connor is a good guy down through the ages. In a deleted scene that is in the movie depending on which version you watch he saves a little girl from The Nazi’s. In 1985 she’s his friend and working as his secretary. 

It probably shouldn’t necessarily spend as much time with the cops who are trying to arrest Connor for murder as it does. Buttttt, the movie just stops for a beat and has a guy at a newspaper stand just absolutely destroy them in one of the funniest 60 seconds I think I have seen this year. 

(I always forget that moment and it always makes me cackle when it shows up.) 

A lot of this would be cut out of a modern movie. There are all these shaggy subplots that wouldn’t make it today. They don’t really add much but they don’t hurt the movie either. Such is the power of a good idea mixed with a good cast. And don’t forget, it’s a movie that gives you an amazing tagline built into the script. 

How many times have two guys shouted “There can be only one!” at each other over the last 40 years. A line that must be up there with “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya,” and “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” in the diologue Mount Rushmore. 

And then there’s the Kurgan. You know how most modern movies spend a lot of time explaining how the villian has “very important reasons” for doing whatever it is they are doing. To the point where people will say, actually I think the hero was wrong. 

Highlander will have none of that. Thank you very much. According to Ramírez The Kurgan comes from a tribe of Russians who threw babies to hungry dogs for fun. 

FOR FUN! 

Every time you see him in the movie you will absolutely believe that is true. This guy makes nuns cry and runs over pedestrians for a laugh. 

In the past he’s a monstrous death dealer. In the present he wears a leather jacket and is basically what your mom was scared of during that childhood vacation in New York City. 

Also, the film is from the 1980s so NYC is presented as the ninth circle of hell. 

Anyway, the Kurgan is evil. The Kurgan is crazy. If the Kurgan is the last man standing when all the other immortals are dead it will doom humanity to an eternity of darkness. You know, for reasons. 

And the Kurgan gets to be crazy and loud and obnoxious to Connor in a church (immortals don’t fight each other on Holy ground). 

And every bit of it works so well because by the end of this thing you just know Connor is gonna end this guy. 

The final fight fulfills the movies promise. The soundtrack is all by Queen. It’s Epic. 

Anyway, this is a nearly perfect movie. 

I’m sure they must have made a bajillion sequels, even though the movie’s plot demands that you can’t really make a sequel. 

But I’m sure the sequels were great. I mean given how much of this is picture perfect, how well thought out all the rules are … well there’s just no way they can screw this up. 

Right?