Highlander II: The Quickening really lets the audience experience the crushing tedium of immortality.
Commiserating thirty years since it debuted in UK cinemas, HIGHLANDER II – THE QUICKENING remains the lowest low water mark for sequels in cinema history. No other film has ever betrayed its predecessor more wilfully and comprehensively than this 1991 follow-up to the original beheadings bonanza. It turns out the catchphrase “there can be only one” was actually a warning.
The year is 2024 and the world swelters under an impenetrable electromagnetic shield – the brainchild of scientist Dr Allan Neyman and, for some reason, noted antiquarian Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) – which was deployed in 1999 in response to the catastrophic deterioration of the ozone layer. Meanwhile, but also five hundred years previously, on the planet Zeist the villainous warlord Katana (Michael Ironside), having sent MacLeod and Ramirez (Sean Connery) to the future to compete for The Prize along with other Zeistian reprobates (they sure ain’t sending us their best people), fears MacLeod’s return and decides to attack him on Earth where he is ageing, mortal and vulnerable.
Shot entirely on location and in studios in Argentina during that country’s economic collapse, what budget there is ends up on the screen, albeit after being savaged by the twin evils of hyperinflation and studio interference. Returning director, Russell Mulcahy, having struck lucky with HIGHLANDER, seems to fancy himself as the new Paul Verhoeven, but ends up fashioning an ersatz retro-futurescape that’s cheap, tawdry and utterly lacking in coherent satire or social commentary. The script finds lazy excuses to handwave the hodgepodge of costumes, technology and vehicles being used in the film, none of which really make any sense, but in that last, at least, they’re aligned with almost everything else.
HIGHLANDER II commits the cardinal sin of trying to explain and clarify the original movie’s mythology, stripping away the mystique and mystery surrounding the immortals, their origins and their dignity, the same error of judgement George Lucas would make (albeit to a less destructive degree) some eight years later in STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. HIGHLANDER II is very much a ‘because’ film. Things happen because the film needs them to happen, often without any kind of narrative set-up to support them. Characters long dead are resurrected ‘just because’, immortality is restored ‘because’, and aged heroes are rejuvenated ‘because’ nobody wants to watch a whole movie of Christopher Lambert wheezing his way through the dialogue under a layer of latex old man make-up.
The fight scenes are frivolous and often farcical, driven seemingly by an excitable attitude of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and a complete obliviousness to the gaping chasm between concept and capability. Left with little alternative, Mulcahy seems to have opted to cover the action scene shortcomings with enough pyrotechnics to make even Michael Bay consider toning things down.
In amongst this ugly, incoherent mess of a movie, Lambert sleepwalks through a movie which asks little of him and, when it does make a request seemingly does so in an unintelligible fashion, accompanied by Virginia Madsen who seems utterly astonished by what’s going on around her, but not in a good way, more asking herself what the Hell she’s gotten herself caught up in.
Unlike anyone in the audience, Michael Ironside, at least, seems to be taking it all in his scenery-chewing stride, making the best fist of the clunky dialogue and occasionally managing to make it work. Nobody, but nobody, though is having more fun than Sean Connery. Connery seems fully cognizant of just how utterly awful the film is and is having a whale of a time anyway. Most of his scenes take place in a mini-movie-within-a-movie as Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez, Chief Metallurgist to King Charles V, finds himself abruptly – and largely inexplicably – reincarnated in modern-day Edinburgh. He gets himself a natty bespoke suit and flirts with ladies on a bizarrely 1950s looking transatlantic propeller plane flight (reminder: it’s meant to be 2024) and eventually meets up with MacLeod only to depart the film about ten minutes later.
There doesn’t seem to be a rock bottom this film isn’t willing to hit and then start immediately excavating and in its theatrical form remains one of the worst movies every made. There is, of course, a latter day so-called Renegade Version of HIGHLANDER II which does address some of the film’s myriad of problems. It doesn’t do anything to prevent it from being an abysmal sequl to the original HIGHLANDER but it does, at least, turn it from an incoherent mess into a plain or garden variety bad sci-fi B-movie. If you’re watching the Renegade Version, you can add another two to this movie’s score, but if you’re watching the theatrical cut of HIGHLANDER II – THE QUICKENING, then you need to take a long hard look at the choices which led you to this point in your life.
