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| THE SWORD IS HIS PENIS. GET IT?! |
The story is Conan(Jason Momoa) is a little boy and some guys kill his father(Ron Pearlman) and wipe out his whole village, so Conan grows up and goes on a revenge quest. There's also some crap about a magic hat with tentacles(no seriously) being assembled that will turn the main baddy into a god, but if Conan doesn't care about it, why should I?
No seriously, their own character doesn't care about the main plot they took so much time to create. He never goes after the bad guy to stop him from becoming all evil. The first half he's going after him to avenge his father, then the second half he's going after him because, I shit you not, to save the girl he fucked. He totally deflowered the pure blood chick the bad guys need for their ritual and he just goes to get her back. But apparently the ritual still works I guess? who knows.
Everything in this movie is just so awful. Laughingly bad, but not so bad you should spend money on it. The moral of this movie is things just happen for no goddamn reason. It's started out narrated by Morgan Freeman, because, I'm assuming, he will just narrate anything without looking at the script. The plot is ridiculous, the pacing is terrible, the violence is graphic and gratuitous but not at all in a good way, and the cgi is just playing bad.
I feel the need to explain exactly how bad it is so filmmakers will understand to NEVER DO THIS AGAIN.
The pacing is just a jumbled mess. We literally spend half an hour with little kid Conan, so those of you who came here for the Jason Momoa abs will have to wait half an hour as they slog through establishing "Conan is a badass and lost his father tragically." And then even after he's grown up, they have to take fifteen minutes to set up "Conan is a badass barbarian who's looking for the guys who murdered his father." This should all take 5 minutes at most. Seriously, how long does it take to set up, "Conan is a barbarian who's father was murdered"? I just did it in one sentence.
But I guess we totally need that scene of kid Conan running around slaughtering people with an egg in his mouth as a test. For no reason.
Conan is a barbarian, which I'm guessing is some kind of not nice person. Except in the first act, they try to establish he's a do-gooder by yelling at and slaughtering some slavers, who have apparently unjustly enslaved a group of topless women. Conan frees them saying, "No one deserves to be enslaved." That's great Conan, real stand-up stuff. Except 20 minutes later, he kidnaps a woman, ties up and gags her(yes it's that kind of movie), and uses her for his own purposes. He totally enslaves the hell out of her!
The violence is just bad. Don't get me wrong, I love a good fight scene with gobs of blood spurting every which way, but only when done right. This is not that. These fight scenes are just disgusting for no reason. Conan cuts off a guy's nose, so you can see the hole, then later he sticks his finger inside the whole while blood and mucus gush out. That's what you have to look forward to. I'd like to say there are a few fight scenes I liked, but it's just not worth it. The blood effects are terrible. If it looked any more like they sliced open a blood pack, we'd see a bunch of plastic bags lying on the ground.
Gratuitous is the word of the day. There are so many topless women in this movie. Just oodles and oodles of topless women, so if you're in need of equal parts lady boobs and man boobs, and you for some reason have no access to the internet, this is the movie for you. It just does not make sense why there are so many topless women. Apparently this was the era before people fully understood shirts. Oh hilarious part: the main chick puts on a shirt and Conan says she looks like a harlot. Ha! Also, see if you can spot a naked guy bathing himself! For no goddamn reason.
I have to say I've never watched the original Schwarzenegger version, but it must be better than this simply because it is not this. And if you were expecting monsters in this you will sadly be disappointed. The only creatures they have are the Sandman from Spiderman 3 and the worst kraken ever. Wait, does creepy incestual Rose Mcgowan with finger gauntlets count as a creature? maybe?
Not having watched the original, this could be straight from the plot(highly doubt that though), in which case I have no right to complain, but the whole bad guys' plot is to put 8 pieces of a magic tentacle hat together then find a virgin to slaughter to complete a ceremony to become a god. But he already finds the last piece of the magic tentacle hat when he meets child conan, not ten minutes after the movie starts, meaning he's spent 20 years just trying to find a true blood virgin.
A) you don't think that after 10 years his troops would go, "Hey, where the hell is this chick at?" and just leave him for having a dumb plan? And B) why go to all the trouble of explaining how it's been cut up into 8 pieces if you're just going to put it back together in 5 minutes? The point of this is to have him find a piece at the beginning and have him spend the rest of the movie finding the other 7. It creates tension, purpose, and plot. "Can Conan stop him from getting the piece this time?!" That's how it's done. You just wasted all of Morgan Freeman's hard work setting up the backstory. You could have just said "there's a magic hat and you need a virgin to do a ritual" And then 5 minutes later he finds the magic hat! I at no point cared about the plot or the story or felt any inkling of suspense or tension.
Here are several things in the movie that make no goddamn sense:
For the entire length of the movie, the main bad guy has a team of elephants carrying a huge boat across the wastelands. For no reason. There's just literally no reason for this. We keep seeing shots of them carrying it over land, but there's never any bodies of water in sight. there was no dock that it came from, and they don't bring it to any bay, so I have to believe he's just had his minions carrying a huge fucking boat around for 20 years because he felt like it.
And the one time Conan and the main girl get away by jumping off a cliff into the ocean to swim to their Black Friend's boat, this would be the bad guy's one time to finally say, "Aha! I've been planning for this for 20 years! Cast the boat into the water! AFTER THEM!" Nope. The bad guys just let them get away and continue to carry the boat over land. For no goddamn reason.
Conan and Co. are sleeping on a boat in the middle of night when they get sneak attacked. They instantly wake up and start fighting guys, and magically it's the middle of the goddamn day. HOW DID NO ONE NOTICE THIS?!
Conan is trying to protect the main girl because she's the one the main bad guy needs. So he goes off to find said main bad guy, while telling her to stay with his Black Friend on his boat so said Black Friend can sail her away to safety. Except seeing their sexual tension, the Black Friend gives her some bullshit errand so she can run after Conan even though HE'S SUPPOSED TO PROTECT HER FROM BEING KIDNAPED. And then she and Conan have sex. Think "The Room" sex. And you'd think, being the smart people they are, they'd screw in the bushes a short ways from the ship for an hour so she can get back easily. NOPE. They have sex, and sleep a whole night, in some random cottage miles away from the boat so she can waltz out later and get kidnapped. But hey, you get to see Conan's ass.
Conan needs to break into the main bad guy's castle to get his wench back, but seeing as its an impenetrable castle, he needs his friend the thief(who they established as a thief earlier by the thief yelling exposition at Conan as he strides away) to break in. Because the thief is a master lock picker. Except he doesn't really pick locks so much as he has a giant key ring full of keys that randomly fit into the doors they need to open. So really, he's not a master lockpick, and he could have just given the key ring to Conan.
Then when they do break in, they have a fairly lame kraken battle, then run to the top of the castle only to see the bad guy carrying off his wench somewhere else, making their break-in an utter waste of time.
I keep saying "his Black Friend" because I need to point out one of its few saving points. I fully expected the Black Friend to die horribly and for Conan to have to avenge him, but amazingly he didn't! The movie just sort of forgot about him. So technically Conan has one-up over First Class.
I hope you like seeing horses getting punched in the face and generally slaughtered, because they do that alot in here. Conan included. Where they get all these extra horses after just killing the ones they rode in on or why any horse would let these assholes ride them is beyond me.
Oh hey, y'know that main bad guy who's trying to become a god? He totes does it. He puts the tentacle hat on and supposedly becomes all powerful. I say supposedly because he never once uses his god-like powers, except for the one time the script demands it. And then he gets defeated by falling into lava. Oh lava, you make fools of us all. Even gods. For no goddamn reason.
I saw it in 3D and it was the worst 3D I've ever seen. I have to admit there was one cool shot at the very end, but by that time I had already been bombarded with too much crap to care. Half the time they didn't use it at all(they even missed out on some prime throwing shit at people's faces shots), and the other half looked completely screwed up. I've never seen anything like it. It looked like things were moving that shouldn't rightly move. I really don't understand how they went out of their way to make it look that horrible.
Why you should see it: You shouldn't.
Downfalls: Everything.
Overall: This is a terrible movie with no rhyme or reason. It's just one power fantasy after another. It's just so bad. It's Sucker Punch bad. It's Green Lantern bad. It's The Last Airbender bad. The only reason it's not as bad as those is because no one had high expectations. This movie was made strictly for the purpose for people to point and laugh at. Don't go see it in the theaters, wait for it to come out, rent it, and bring lots of booze.
One Scene Metaphor: Ok, the first thing we see is some horrible cgi baby Conan in the womb, when a sword gets stuck in his mother's belly, because apparently they let a preggers woman fight on the battle field. Mama Conan kills the guy, then she tells Papa Conan that she wants to see her baby before she dies. So instead of pushing him out, which would be all too logical, she hands him a sword and papa Conan cuts baby Conan out of her. And this must be the first movie ever where you actually see the baby's penis for God knows what reason. And then after mama Conan dies, papa Conan raises baby Conan above his head, still in the middle of the fucking battlefield, like it's the goddamn Lion King. And that is the very first scene of the movie. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, people.
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