REVIEW: The Number 23 (2007)

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the fact that I’m not being hunted by evil numbers, that I’m not in prison, that I don’t run into evil dogs who guard the land of the dead, and that I am done watching The Number 23.

Director: Joel Schumacher

Starring: Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen

IMDb

Yeah, you remember this…the Jim Carrey thriller about a guy who is haunted by the constant reoccurrence of the number 23. Apt title, huh? It was Carrey's first real "serious" thriller, and for that it got a lot of press when it came out...I strongly suspect it would have been completely ignored if Carrey hadn't been in it. Otherwise this thing is just silly as hell, and full of ridiculous moments for me to make fun of, so that’s always something to rejoice about. And guess who directed it!

That’s right, Joel Schumacher made this shit. The guy who gave you bat nipples and the bat credit card made a stupid and terrible movie…I’m actually not even remotely surprised. Moving along.

It starts off with Jim Carrey in another classic comedic role…oh, wait, did I say comedic role? I meant serious thriller. So what’s his first profound, serious act in the film which separates this from his silly comedic roles in the past? He’s sitting in his truck, sees a dog go by and makes cat noises at it, which cause the dog to start going berserk…are we SURE this is a serious movie?!

Oh yeah, every great drama should start with the hero making cat noises at small dogs. That's a classic way to kick off a stirring serious movie.

We then see that he’s a dog catcher who takes his job a little too seriously as he delivers hammy speeches while chasing dogs through graveyards. I guess you have to get your kicks somehow when you’re a part of such a grave and serious profession. Wouldn’t want to let the gravity of the job of DOG CATCHER get to you, right?

OK, OK, so his job is silly…but what about his home life? He’s married to Virginia Madsen, and you have to give her credit…this is at least a better movie than either Highlander 2 or Candyman, so she’s moved up in the world since the early 90s. But given this film’s quality as is, that’s kind of like saying getting kicked in the shin with a steel toed boot isn’t as bad as your wife cheating on you with the mailman. Inconsequential and without any real upsides to the deal either way. Madsen, while the two are out on a date, finds a moldy old book called “The Number 23,” which she buys for no other reason other than to advance the story, because God knows they couldn’t figure out any other way to move this contrived crap forward.

Inexplicably, Carrey starts to read the book too, which tells the story of a guy named Fingerling who, as a child, found the dead body of his next door neighbor, and that screwed him up so much he became a super-cool detective!

Ooh, look at all that BLACK he's wearing! What a badass! What a tortured soul!

This whole thing is told in an alternate universe in which Carrey portrays Fingerling as the text of the novel is narrated over top. Fingerling goes and meets this suicidal woman who is crazy because she keeps seeing the number 23 everywhere. Which basically means she looks too far into everything and draws ridiculous conclusions from meaningless nonsense…wait; actually that sums up a lot of the first two acts of this movie. She’s played by Lynn Collins, who is a good actress, if your standards for a good actress include terrible, unbelievable emoting and lots of over the top screaming. Different strokes for different folks.

I mean this chick is nuts, man. Here’s some of her brilliant dialogue…

“Pink is my favorite color. You know what pink is? Red, 27. White, 65. 27, 65, 92. Pink has four letters – 92 divided by 4…TWENTY FUCKING THREE!”

How about…pick a new favorite color? Just a thought. You crazy nutball, you. Also, nice acting! You’re about as credible as a 13-year-old trying out for a middle school production of Mean Girls.

Well, OK. A mental institution production of Mean Girls.

Then we find out that maybe detectives aren’t qualified to give therapy to suicidal people as the woman throws herself out a window the moment Fingerling turns his back. Then later on, we see that Fingerling is such a good detective with such a sane girlfriend that they have sex at the crime scene! Totally OK!

Look at those monochrome colors and how evil they both look and how they're having sex at a crime scene...that's edgy stuff, man! Don't mess with these two!

In real life Carrey says he can really relate to this book. Really not making a stand-up case for yourself as the sane character who slowly goes crazy, buddy.

As he reads more of the book, he sees that Fingerling drives his girlfriend into the arms of another man by getting so paranoid about the number 23 that he starts counting her shoes (23 pairs, yo!) while they’re having sex. And then he’s surprised when she doesn’t want to keep on having sex. Are you kidding me, movie? Chicks love it when I talk about my paranoid obsessions! Hell, I remember last week I was hanging out with a girl and told her that I kept seeing strange visions of men in black taking away people on the street. For some reason she hasn’t returned any of my calls.

In real life, Carrey gets more and more paranoid about the number and starts dragging his wife and kid into it. Well, “real life” in the context of the movie, anyway, because in really real life the wife would take the kid and just go to a hotel while daddy works out his lapses in sanity. But here they stick around and humor him. Carrey, never one to waste an inch of his family’s piteous interest in his insanity, takes this humor and runs with it, even going so far as to draw his wife and son into his crazy schemes. Isn’t he just the perfect father? I think so.

Great familial bonding always means staking out potential serial killers. You guys who just want to go have Thanksgiving dinner with your loved ones are missing out.

So we get some stupid scenes of the son being all like, “dude, I’m 15 years old, I believe in stupid conspiracies because I can’t help it at my age (but once I get to my 30s like you, Dad, I’ll think it’s all totally retarded)!” They even go to the extent of circling every 23^rd word on every 23^rd page of the book, which somehow leads them to this park where a dead girl is buried. And you know, father and son bonding is at its best when you’re hunting for buried bodies in the middle of the night.

"Hey, son, point the flashlight over here!"
"Okay Dad, this is some great father-son time we're having here! Totally not scarring me for life!"

While Carrey and his son are calling the cops, apparently his wife and this doctor guy come and STEAL THE WHOLE SKELETON OUT OF THE HOLE, and disappear before Carrey comes back. Did Carrey really wander so far away from the site where they found the body that he would ENTIRELY MISS TWO PEOPLE DIGGING IT UP AND DRAGGING IT AWAY? If so, why? And what, his son is so blind and deaf he didn’t notice it either? Either these two are the STUPIDEST ASSHOLES IN THE UNIVERSE, or the movie is just a shining example of horrible writing. I’m currently weighing the two to decide which one is really true…while I’m doing that, let’s just wrap up the review.

It turns out that Carrey himself committed the murder and wrote the book The Number 23, and then repressed the murder after some brain damage and the book was published by his psychologists under a pseudonym (Topsy Kretts…Top Secrets…yeah, that’s about the level of wit this movie has).

Yup. That’s all there is to it. Totally not ANY stupid plot holes I need to talk about or elaborate on further with this. I’m done with the review. Yup. The worst parts of the movie are behind me. I am absolutely, positively DONE.

….

….

Yup….done…

……

…..

Oh, you didn’t believe that for a second. Alright, where do I start? Well, let’s just go chronologically through the whole mess, which tells Carrey’s strange backstory. Basically he saw his father kill himself when he was a kid, and so Carrey was screwed up. In college he met a hot chick who liked to be handcuffed to beds and liked her men to threaten her with knives. Because someone like that is obviously the picture of stability, Carrey was surprised when she started cheating on him. I guess he was a total moron. He got obsessed with the number 23 because of his father’s paranoia in his childhood, which further drove her away.

They apparently met at a hotel, where Carrey strangled her and then stabbed her a bunch of times, making a big mess – they don’t pay hotel maids nearly enough, you know? Carrey ran away but then the guy she was cheating on him with showed up and got arrested for the crime and sentenced to prison for life just because he touched the knife. Because it’s not like Carrey would have left ANY fingerprints or identifying marks when he stabbed a woman in the heat of passion. I mean he didn’t even have time to clean up or anything! How are the cops this stupid? Even in a Joel Schumacher film I expect at least some intelligence. They really didn’t even bother to CHECK THE CRIME SCENE for any indication that, here’s a bright idea, the bloody, violent stabbing death WASN’T committed by the guy with no blood on him at all and no signs of having struggled with anyone? Hell, even a Seth Rogen comedy like Observe and Report had more realistic cops than this! That’s how bad we’ve gotten!

"You have no blood or fingerprints anywhere else on scene, but we're arresting you and putting you away for life without trial, because that's how we do things in Schumacher world! We're the best cops!"

Oh, but it doesn’t even stop there! The movie goes lower! After that, apparently Carrey wrote the entire book The Number 23, starting it as a suicide note but then deciding to hide the last chapter (which contained the actual suicide note and confession) right before jumping out a window to try and kill himself. What sense does that make? But he survived anyway and was taken to a mental institution where he apparently recovered with, very conveniently, no memory of the horrible murder, the writing of the book or even of the girl he liked so much at all. Everything else about him was fine – he just lost the memories of all the bad stuff that had happened in recent times.

After recovering, he literally bumped into Virginia Madsen’s character RIGHT AT THE GATES OF THE MENTAL HOSPITAL, after which it is implied they started their relationship, got married and had kids…

I just love this...how stupid is it that he meets the future love of his life right as he's walking out of a mental institution? He didn't even make it all the way out the gates yet.

...so I guess it never came up why he was at that hospital, or that he had memory loss, or that the cops would want him for questioning after his ex-girlfriend he didn’t remember was violently stabbed and murdered? THAT MAKES NO GODDAMN BAT-SHIT SENSE AT ALL! You just crossed the line movie! You just became completely indefensible! He just goes and lives a normal life for YEARS afterward without anything triggering the memories or anyone from his past reminding him of the girl or his time at the college or anything? Losing your memory isn’t just like taking a few pieces out of a puzzle, you goddamn movie; it’s more complicated than that.

The Number 23 is just a big headache of a movie, with little logic to the story and almost no redeeming factors in any other area either. Jim Carrey tries, but the script is so bad that he doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. Everyone else is just bland, with the exception of the “suicide blonde,” Lynn Collins, who is just terrible in brand new ways. Nothing is atmospheric or effectively done at all, and the film as a whole is just a pile of conspiracy theory shit made by a guy who thought it was a good idea to put George Clooney as Batman. Does that sound like someone whose advice you’d like to take at all?

Truly a respectable filmmaker, Mr. Schumacher is!

The whole "23" thing is so stupid, too, and obviously just the result of really far reaching grasping for straws and paranoia. Every incident of the number can basically be summed up as "coincidence," and all the shit this movie pulls about it is so goofy it's impossible to take seriously. You can take anything and twist it around until it adds or subtracts or multiplies or divides to 23, and anyone who is stupid enough to believe this whole farcical conspiracy...well, this movie is for you guys. Certainly the rest of us don't want it. Frankly I think this movie deserves 23 whippings with a belt.

To sum up the experience of watching The Number 23…well, just watch this video:

The images in this review are copyright of...oh my God, are there 23 total characters in all the captions in this review? I'M COMING APARTTTTTTT!!!!

REVIEW: Candyman (1992)

I apologize in advance for the excessively gory images that you are about to see. But if they stop even one person from watching this horrible movie, then I've done my job well.

Urban legends are like the modern oral folklore. One could say they are simply a passing-down of the traditions from times before man had the written word to convey expressions and stories. If that’s the case, then Candyman is the modern equivalent of stories back then told by dumbass 15 year olds trying to scare their little siblings with tons of tasteless gore.

Director: Bernard Rose

Starring: Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd

IMDb

I really don’t know where to begin with this. It’s not like the movie has absolutely nothing going for it…they have a cool setting and they start off with a decent build up. But after that? Nothing. Even worse than movies that are all-out bad from the start are the ones that have something going but then do nothing with it, like a cool looking car that peters out on you after twenty minutes on the freeway without even hitting 80 mph. And to top it all off, this is another tale “inspired” by the “brilliance” of that lovable Clive Barker…my heart can barely contain its joy…

Well we start off with some idiot telling a story about a girl who cheated on her boyfriend while babysitting with…Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Looper?

Well, as long as Bruce Willis didn't come back trying to kill a bunch of little kids, I think it's OK that he's in this house where his girlfriend is babysitting.

And they have a rather bizarre method of foreplay…telling stories about a supernatural serial killer called Candyman who appears when you say his name five times in a mirror and then guts and disembowels you with a bloody meat hook. They even start groping one another and the girl even takes off her shirt while they’re talking about this! How perfectly insane!

"Oh baby, talking about people getting murdered with a rusty hook and disemboweled really turns me on! Almost as much as picking each others' noses or talking about our embarrassing bowel movements after eating Chipotle!"

Anyway, they get killed and we get introduced to the real main characters – Highlander 2 survivor Virginia Madsen and her best friend, Token Intelligent Sophisticated Black Woman. They’re doing a study on urban legends for a graduate school class, and throughout the first half hour we get a lot of different people telling stories to them, sometimes when they don’t even plan it, about various urban legends they hear of, including the Candyman story. It’s kind of hokey, but it actually does create some suspense…suspense that the rest of the movie will fail to live up to.

Madsen’s husband is a dorky looking professor at the same school, because that happens so much! And their marriage is so good that she immediately gets jealous whenever a young girl even looks at him the wrong way…yeah, I’m sure she’s a great catch…pfft.

Madsen and her friend discover an interesting fact about their apartment building; that it was actually built the same way as another building called Cabrini Green where everyone apparently lives in fear of the Candyman who was mentioned before. So they hatch a plot to go break into Cabrini Green while dressing like they’re going to experience a winter in Russia.

Off for a Siberian winter in ghettoville...

Inside, they find some pictures and graffiti on the wall that all points toward the larger-than-life Candyman myth that has taken hold of Cabrini Green – I really like the setting here, and more movies should utilize this kind of ghetto urbanized city setting for a horror movie plot. Again though, the movie will eventually even throw this out the window and replace it with overwrought hokey nonsense masquerading as something “deep.” Doesn’t that sound fun?

We also get the story of Candyman told by a fat guy who looks like Ben Franklin’s loser cousin…apparently he was a slave who fell in love with a white noblewoman and got her pregnant, so a bunch of villagers killed him with bees.

Trouble strikes, however, when Madsen talks to a little boy who tells her to go look in the public bathroom where some other little kid allegedly got his balls cut off by the Candyman. She goes inside, finds some bugs using the toilet, and gives them some privacy:

After that, she’s confronted by some gang members who give her a black eye for using their favorite bathroom…because a black eye is always the WORST thing a whole group of violent thugs can do to a vulnerable white woman who they have cornered! I’m totally convinced!

But seriously, THIS is what I mean when I say the movie had potential! We could have had a very interesting take on urban legends by having the whole thing end up a hoax perpetuated by gang members who want to rule the neighborhood. Maybe some slight supernatural leanings would have been OK if they were really vague, but if I was re-doing this story, I sure wouldn’t have gone full-out Nightmare on Elm Street mode after this. Ugh. What could have been a great commentary on poverty and believing in myths reduced to a third-rate slasher horror movie with as much imagination as a pet rock. That’s great, guys. Just great.

OK, back to the review, back to the review…so after telling on the gang members, Madsen is confronted again in the parking lot by the real Candyman! He talks in a cool voice and…that’s really about it. If you thought Pinhead was too white, or the guy from Lord of Illusions was too lame, well Candyman is for you!

The Lord of Disappointingly Boring Scenes cometh!

I’m not going to lie…after this scene, the movie just gives up. It doesn’t even bother to try anymore. The movie just turns into a really bloody slasher movie with nothing good about it. Disappointment, thy name is Candyman…I’ve seriously rarely ever seen a movie just up and stop dead in its tracks like this, just cease to be relevant or meaningful on any level beyond hey, look at our cool special effects! Well, not since The Dark Knight Rises, anyway.

But I digress again…do you like severed dogs’ heads and screaming, crying women and lots of blood all over the place? Is that your idea of what constitutes real fear? Well then you’ll love this scene.

OOH, A DOG'S HEAD! LOOK AT ALL THIS GORE!!!

And there's some BLOOD and KNIVES and SCREAMING and oooh, just so creepy, right?! WE ARE THE EDGY ONES! LOOK AT US AS WE BREAK SOCIAL TABOOS! So violent and gross!

Apparently Madsen has been framed for the murder of a dog, the kidnapping of a baby and the smearing of a ton of red paint all over the walls…amazing…and the cops who were previously very understanding to her plight are now total jackasses without even one inch of any kind of humanity towards her!

After another scene in which the Candyman brutally murders her best friend for no reason...

This just pisses me off. I know characters die in horror movies, it's just part of the territory, but this was just SO BADLY DONE of a scene! There's a difference between adding kills to scare the audience and just being straight up cruel, which is what this is. Needlessly, relentlessly cruel. Why did this character deserve to be murdered in such a brutal, undignified way? What was her crime outside of being dumb enough to take a minor role in a Clive Barker film? Fuck you, Candyman.

...Madsen is institutionalized and kept there on drugs for a whole month. The doctor calls her into his office one day seemingly at random, and to prove that the Candyman is real, she decides to look into the randomly placed mirror on the wall and say his name five times. Even though she KNOWS HE’S GOING TO POP UP AND KILL THE GUY…she just does it anyway! What, did the drugs addle her brain so much that she forgot he was a killing machine? Did she think he was just going to sit down with them for a polite discussion about how he framed her for all the murders so far? Oh well, who cares…GORE!

Killing off a random doctor who was just trying to help? Great job, Virginia Madsen...great job...you deserve a Darwin Award at this point. If she had just SHUT HER DAMN MOUTH and NOT summoned him from the mirror, this whole thing could have been avoided. 

Then she finds out her husband is shacked up with one of his much younger students, but really Madsen herself was already a student to begin with…so really, he just moved from one nubile young woman to another. What a pedophile. I bet he and that weird priest from Pinocchio’s Revenge would get along fine.

"I actually listen to his confessions every week..."

So she runs off to look at the ocean while Candyman intones some more pseudo-intellectual poetry over the scene, because that’s really all he’s got besides framing random young women for murder. He should look into other hobbies, like doing movie trailer voice-overs, since that one deep-voiced guy who used to do them has sadly passed away – I think Candyman would be a great substitute personally. He has just the right amount of dramatic deep-toned grittiness in his voice...hey, wait, what was I talking about again? The movie is so dull that I actually completely went off topic.

How is a film with this much admittedly decent gore effects so BORING anyway? It's practically the eighth wonder of the world. By all human logic, there should at least be some kind of enjoyment out of how ridiculous and tasteless the gore is, but the tone of the movie is so suffocatingly serious and somber that I can't even enjoy the gore! It just comes off as mean spirited, ugly and unpleasant.

But what the hell is Candyman's plan, anyway? Kill everyone who can help Virginia Madsen until she goes so crazy that she has to love him? That’s stupid. Almost as stupid as this scene:

Yeah, maybe a better dental plan is in order.

He forces her to come die with him in a big bonfire conveniently happening that night, only she stabs him with a big burning stake and saves herself and the kidnapped child. After that, we get a scene of her husband and his new fuck-buddy hanging out in his apartment as he cries in his room about how Madsen is dead…how are we supposed to feel bad for the scumbag who just ditched the woman he married in a time of need to start dating someone probably not even 21 yet?

"I'm looking in a mirror while wearing a sad expression...aren't I so deep and tormented?"

The movie doesn’t know either, because after that, he says Madsen’s name five times and she somehow appears to him in ghost-form and kills him with a hook! The film then ends on a “shocking” gore sequence, which maybe would have been shocking if we hadn't seen the same effects like 12 times by this point...

Aw, man, now she'll have to clean the bathroom and everything!

Are you surprised? I’m not! Why would anyone be at this point? I can think of painful surgical procedures more enjoyable than this movie. How did anyone ever find redeeming qualities in this? All the decent ideas in the beginning are just thrown in the garbage in favor of tastelessly done gore that adds nothing to the atmosphere or overall story. The Candyman himself is dull as hell and doesn't do anything half the time besides just intone boring monologues at a snail's pace, and the whole thing is just a drag to watch, too, as it tries so hard to be all deep and profound, with all its deep-voiced narrations over wide-panned shots of the city, when really all it is is a stupid slasher movie huffing and puffing to try and make itself look cooler and more serious.

Candyman is a very nasty, stupid, unpleasant movie with nothing at all to say and no real value to anyone who wants more out of a film than gore effects Tom Savini could do better on one of his off days. It doesn't even work as a gore flick because the whole thing tries so hard like I mentioned – the people who want some over the top gore will be bored by the attempts at being all artsy and atmospheric, which are as clumsy and hamfisted as I've ever seen. It pleases neither audience.

This is one of the worst movies I've ever reviewed on this site, and I feel very confident in saying I cannot see what anyone finds appealing about it. As a straightforward horror flick it’s a boring plod-along, but as an attempt at being anything else – anything with more atmosphere or cerebral satisfaction to its scares – it's just sad and a total waste of brain cells from everyone involved. Candyman can go right to hell and I am glad I will never have to sit through this crap again!

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: Highlander 2 (1990)

This sequel to the 80s bastion of moldy cheese that was Highlander is reviled by many fans of the original movie for reasons that...well, let’s be honest, the reasons why people hate this sequel become apparent about a minute and a half into the movie. Maybe even before that. But is it really one of the worst sequels of all time? Is it really such a travesty? Well, why don’t we do that thing I always do and figure it out together?!

Director: Russel Mulcahy

Starring: Christopher Lambert, Virginia Madsen, Sean Connery, Michael Ironside

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102034/

So before we even get to the actual film, how about the Netflix envelope? This movie is so half-assed and confusing that even the envelope it comes in from a movie rental service is apologizing for it, admitting that it is so stupid that nobody could for even one second find it credible. These are the words, printed verbatim from the outside package, that come with Highlander 2: “This sequel to the cult sci-fi action film largely discards the original’s premise of mysterious immortal swordsmen, revealing Connor McLeod and Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez to be long-lived aliens.”

Yeah, “largely discards the original’s premise.” As if they’re just warning you not to rent this crap! And yes, this is real; the Highlanders are aliens, complete with a plot about what amounts to saving the world from global warming. Are we still in the same universe? How does this have ANYTHING to do with Highlander? And it’s by the same director as the first one?!? Did he just get a surprise back-alley lobotomy in between films? There’s only a three year difference! What the hell happened? Well, I guess we’ll never find out if we just sit around bitching about it all afternoon.

The film begins with a text scroll explaining that the ozone layer just mysteriously deteriorated so much by the year 1990 something that scientists had to construct a “shield” to protect humanity from radiation poisoning, which eventually backfired and almost entirely eclipsed the sun. Now an evil corporation controls the “shield” and uses it to blackmail the public. Yeah, sounds like Highlander to me, too! I guess this could be a good plot for an entirely different movie, but for a Highlander sequel…this is just out of left field.

And remember how the last movie started with a wrestling match flashing back to medieval Scotland? Well, this movie starts out with an opera:

…and then flashes back to the warlike planet Mars as alien tribes ready themselves for battle! And no I swear I am not making this up:

Yeah, apparently the Netflix envelope was telling the truth – Connor McLeod (Christopher Lambert) and…well, Sean Connery, since let’s face it, none of you are going to call him by his character name…are aliens in some space war, captured by this alien warlord Highlander guy named Katana. This character is played very poorly by Michael Ironside, a great actor stooping to an almost unheard of low by acting in this dreck. He banishes McLeod and Connery to Earth, where the events of the first movie transpire over hundreds of years.

…you know, there are just some things that remained better unexplained. Honestly, who ever thought the story of the first Highlander involved aliens from Mars? Nobody, because IT’S A DAMN TERRIBLE IDEA. It’s like pretending the story behind Michael Myers from Halloween involves ancient voodoo rituals and Pagan crap…oh, wait. Carry on, then.

So McLeod, apparently, became mortal for some reason after the events of the first movie and before the whole “shield” debacle started. He is living out his days as a crusty old man with just about the silliest old-man voice imaginable. I don’t really have a sound clip, but seriously, just picture the goofiest old man you ever heard in a Nickelodeon cartoon – McLeod is worse. It’s a really bad sign when I can’t take the MAIN CHARACTER OF YOUR MOVIE seriously for even one damn second.

I'm just a doddering old fool! I should probably be in a nursing home, but hell, it's the future! We've outgrown those primitive institutions. So now I just walk the streets getting harasseed by everyone.

But it’s OK, because Michael Ironside is ready to one-up this ridiculousness as he commands his two BDSM Cenobite minions to go and kill McLeod. They point out that he is so old that he will die on his own soon anyway, but since we wouldn’t have a movie in that case, Ironside rejects that sensible idea and tells them to go to the future and kill him anyway. Hooray for illogical decisions!

Ha ha ha...they look like something Tim Burton would dress his kids up as for Halloween. Edward Scissorhands-lite.

They attack him and he fights them off really well for an old coot, and then he even turns back to his younger immortal self, because the two goons messed with the time stream or something. Now, this begs the question…if they can just go anywhere in time, why not just go back to when they first put him on Earth and cut his head off before he awakened his powers that first time? Or why not just go back to when they had him enslaved at first and kill him while he was bound in chains? Oh, wait, because then we wouldn’t have a movie. Silly me!

Is he really riding on flying shoes? Seriously? That's really lame...I don't even have any other jokes.

Also, I’m SO GLAD Ironside sent his two goons back to kill McLeod thus bringing him back to his younger and more powerful state! This guy is a GENIUS!

To distract you from the stupidity of the movie, we then see McLeod having hot steamy sex with a woman he doesn’t even know, the head of some kind of terrorist organization that was only written into the script as an afterthought:

I really can’t even describe how strange this scene is – not with just still pictures. She confronts him after his fight with the two goons and asks what happened, and then he…hypnotizes her, I guess, to start making out and screwing him right there on the spot. It’s less “sexy” and more “incredibly uncomfortable and creepy.” Mostly just makes you feel like you need a shower.

But if THAT wasn’t ludicrous enough for you, apparently McLeod can bring back the dead Sean Connery by just…shouting his name at the sky, as he returns like he never got killed by The Kurgan in the flashbacks of the first movie. He interrupts a performance of Hamlet and doesn’t seem to realize it’s a show:

Truly how Shakespeare was meant to be performed, with the added inclusion of a buffoon who has a Scottish accent but whose character and name are supposed to be Spanish.

So they just never had minstrel shows or anything in old Scotland, then? I’m calling bullshit on that. But it does give us a stale and unfunny attempt at a comedic scene, which is pretty much all you’ll be getting from Connery for the entire film. Oh, he’s confused and doesn’t understand modern slang and technology? HOW INVENTIVE AND GENIUS! Great comedy! Well, about as funny as my grandma’s leftover spinach from three weeks ago.

And then we see Michael Ironside’s grand entrance to Earth as he just falls from the sky and crashes right through a subway train moving by:


I didn't have space in the review itself, but there's a part where he goes up to someone on the train and says "We're not in Kansas anymore," or something like that. How does he know that reference? Bad 90s writing of course! Man I need a drink. Of the alcoholic persuasion.

Okay, for one, how did he not do that more elegantly? Nobody else we’ve seen teleporting in the movie is that clumsy – hell, even Ironside’s minions did it better! And two, if he had the ability to do this, WHY DIDN’T HE JUST DO THIS FIRST INSTEAD OF LETTING HIS MINIONS DO IT? Oh yeah, because there would be no movie that way! Silly me!

So Ironside goes on a joy ride with the train in which he tries, and fails miserably, to reach the hammy heights of the Kurgan from the last movie. He’s pretty silly, yeah, but you just can’t beat a big muscular bald guy sitting in a church and making faces at the preachers. Or a crazy after-dark ride with an old lady. But I digress – the main reason Ironside pretty much sucks is because after his joy ride, in which he kills pretty much every passenger of the train, he opens the door looking all frazzled like a cartoon character and says “Last stop?”

Seriously, this shit is like Wile E. Coyote written by people with no grasp of comedy. IT’S AWFUL.

Oh, what’s that? You want more garbage comedy attempts puked out of the collective depths of the writers’ bowels? Well, how about like three different scenes of Sean Connery on a plane with the subtitle “Somewhere over the Atlantic” – which makes no sense seeing as it should only take him a few hours, and yet at least a day’s worth of events happens in the movie’s time and he still isn’t there – making chit chat with the passengers and flirting creepily with women?

She was paid a lot of money to laugh at Connery in this movie...

I also really love the future's airline etiquette: they don't show the safety video that tells you to buckle your seatbelt and that your seat can be used as a floatation device until NOW. Yeah, they wouldn't show it before the plane took off - they'd wait until the plane was "somewhere over the Atlantic" to inform the passengers of what to do in case of an emergency!

Yes, to keep the passengers as calm as possible, this airline shows a video of people panicking and the plane crashing IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FLIGHT. Gee. I didn't know United Airways went downhill so much in the future!

So McLeod goes to visit this old professor friend of his who helped him back in the day with that shield thing that stopped the ozone from killing everyone. The weirdest part is that the friend doesn’t realize that McLeod has de-aged. He just thinks McLeod “got a face job” or something…how is this guy a scientist again? I wouldn’t trust him to bag my groceries.

But apparently the government doesn’t trust him either, as they have him arrested and thrown in jail for possibly knowing that there could be clean unpolluted air outside the shield, and the exact coordinates at which one can find it. McLeod, however, is busy fighting Ironside, although the fight is not actually resolved so much as just…temporarily stopped. The movie then fades into McLeod’s new love interest sleeping – I really don’t think transitioning from a fight scene into someone sleeping is a good way to get your audience hooked.

McLeod finally meets up with Connery again after the longest plane ride in history. The two take the love interest chick and run off to save the world! They find Mr. Unreliable Scientist Friend and tell him everything is OK, and then he just dies right there, like his life’s purpose is complete. How sad…? No, sorry, I really can’t get emotionally invested in any of this. If it seems like I’m rushing this review, I am – there’s too much to talk about and not enough space to do so.

So some more really boring sword fight scenes – like you have no idea how boring these things are – McLeod and Connery make it through the maze. Connery sacrifices his life for no reason. McLeod and Ironside finally square off right by the generator machine, and Ironside is beheaded in typical Highlander fashion. Connery’s voice narrates from beyond the grave somehow and says they must work together to destroy the shield and break down the walls under the sky.

Now, keep in mind, this generator thing has been BUILT UP TO ALL HELL before this scene, with everyone saying it was impossible to get to and acting like it was completely impenetrable. So HOW does McLeod finally beat it? Get ready for the most exciting, nail-biting, ground-breaking, intense scene to EVER…yeah, he just walks in and then the shield is destroyed:

What the---?! How---?! Why---?! Oh, screw it, there was no thought put into this, so I’m not going to waste my time. He seriously just…walks in and everything is fine. That’s how easy it was the whole time to return the Earth to normal! How did the ozone layer just randomly return itself to its normal state and make the air habitable again? Who cares, the movie is over! I’m happy with that as it is!

This movie was stupid. Everything was so convoluted and such a mess that the film just collapsed under its own weight. This series isn’t that complicated, guys! It’s immortal swordsmen duking it out until only one remains. How did all of this bullshit about aliens from Mars and global warming and the ozone layer get filtered into the mix? Not to mention the awful “comedy” from Sean Connery and Michael Ironside and the contrived romance, along with the terrible special effects - pretty sure even the first movie had better special effects than the ones here.

It’s really no wonder that future Highlander sequels disregard this film entirely as part of the series canon, and that almost every fan hates it with a passion. I won’t say it’s absolutely unsalvageable, as there are a few good ideas here and there (I kind of like the whole idea that McLeod tried to save the world but ended up backfiring with the shield, causing everyone to hate him), but the haphazard way the story is put together as well as the numerous plot holes just makes it too much to bear. Highlander 2 is a dud.

What’s that? You want me to review a sequel that is equally, if not more so, horrible, that people actually LIKE? Well, okay then. See you next week!

TO BE CONTINUED…

DISCLAIMER: I have nothing against United Airways.
DISCLAIMER 2: The pictures in this review do not belong to me. They are copyright of their original owners.