There can only be five films, three TV series and two web series.
Highlander (1986): 7 out of 10: There are movies that age gracefully, movies that age badly, and then there is Highlander, which appears to have aged by being struck repeatedly by lightning while Queen played in the background. This is not necessarily a complaint.
Highlander is one of those deeply, gloriously 1980s films that feels less like it was produced than summoned. It has sword fights, immortals, decapitations, New York City grime, Scottish clansmen, Sean Connery playing an Egyptian from Spain, Christopher Lambert playing a Scottish immortal despite sounding like Christopher Lambert, and a mythology that the movie does not so much explain as hurl at the audience while shouting, “There can only be one!” And honestly, I respect that.
The film begins, more or less, with the idea that there are immortals walking among us. They can live forever unless someone chops off their head, at which point the victor absorbs some sort of lightning-based spiritual power called I believe the Quickening. (It is a bit muddled).
Eventually these immortals must fight until only one remains, for reasons that are never explained in any meaningful fashion. Why are there immortals? Why do they need to fight? Why swords? Why can there only be one? What happens if there are two but one of them just moves to Cleveland and keeps his head down?
The movie is not interested in your questions. This is the new mythology. This is the new IP. You are expected to keep up.
That turns out to be one of the film’s great strengths. Modern movies would spend forty minutes and three post-credit scenes explaining the rules, the origin, the secret council, the ancient prophecy, the prequel hook, the streaming spin-off, and the animated children’s show. Highlander just says immortals exist, they fight with swords, Queen is here, Sean Connery is wearing something insane, and away we go.
It is refreshing. It is also, of course, ridiculous.
The other great thing about Highlander is that it brings back that particular Cannon Films feeling. It is the kind of movie that could only have come from an era when filmmakers were willing to be absolutely insane and somehow still get their movie into theaters.
A movie about immortal Scottish swordsmen living in modern New York City? Sure. Sean Connery as an Egyptian Spaniard? Why not? Queen doing the soundtrack? Obviously. A villain who looks like he escaped from a heavy metal parking lot? Naturally. This is the cinema of cocaine.
The Good
The best thing about Highlander is that it has an actual sense of myth. Not coherence, mind you. Myth.
There is a difference. Coherence requires rules, logic, structure, and the sense that someone knows what all of this means. Myth requires mood, confidence, a few big images, and the willingness to behave as if everything happening is terribly important. Highlander is very good at that. The movie does not explain itself, but it does believe in itself, and that counts for a lot.
The idea of immortals secretly living among us is still a strong one. The “there can only be one” slogan is strong. The sword fights are strong. The idea of a man carrying centuries of love, loss, exile, and violence inside him is strong. The execution is uneven, but the core concept is so good that it powered sequels, a television series, and a surprising amount of cultural memory from a film that is basically 120 minutes of sometimes stylish nonsense.
The Scottish material is also fun. I am not entirely sure how much of it is supposed to be funny, but I enjoyed it. The villagers are broad, the accents are all over the place, and the whole thing has the pleasing air of a Renaissance fair without fat Americans.
There is something charming about how quickly everyone decides that Connor MacLeod recovering from fatal wounds means he must be in league with the devil and should be burned at the stake. This is why people leave small towns. It’s the burning at the stake because you flipped a water bottle and it landed upright.
In the middle of all this comes Sean Connery. Because if you are making a movie about Highlanders in Scotland, of course you hire Sean Connery. What do you mean he is playing an Egyptian named Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez who has apparently spent time in Spain? I mean how much cocaine did the filmmakers have?
Connery is having fun, and his fun is infectious. He does not make a great deal of sense in the movie, but then very little in the movie makes a great deal of sense. He swans into the film dressed like an Egyptian Spanish dandy boy, and somehow everyone just gets on with it.
In a village where people want to burn a man alive because he healed too quickly, I can only imagine what they made of Sean Connery wandering around wearing a literal peacock cape.
Still, Connery gives the movie a lift. He understands the assignment, or at least understands that the assignment cannot possibly be taken literally. He brings charm, authority, and a nice bit of grandfatherly lunacy to the proceedings.
Christopher Lambert is more complicated. Lambert has been criticized for his acting in Highlander, and it is not hard to see why. He is not exactly a whirlwind of expressive emotional subtlety. He often appears to be standing around with his mouth half open, processing the idea that he is in a movie. His accent is also not so much Scottish as generic European at an airport.
But I do not think he is awful. I mean he is not great, He often seems to be staring off into space with the goofiest of expressions, but he is not awful. There is a strange quality to Lambert that works for the character. He seems disconnected from the world around him, which is not entirely inappropriate for a centuries-old immortal who has watched everyone he loves die. Whether this is acting or just Christopher Lambert being Christopher Lambert is a question for the philosophers, but the result is not fatal to the film.
The New York material is also a time capsule in the best way. This is 1980s New York, back when the city was cinematically required to be a hellhole. The streets look dangerous, the subways look cursed, and every alley appears to contain at least three murders and a hooker.
Yet, in classic movie fashion, the main characters all have absurdly nice apartments. Apparently, in this version of New York, you step over six homeless people on your way home to an apartment that looks like a room in the Louvre.
The Queen soundtrack is also impossible to ignore. Everyone remembers the big stuff, especially the immortal-friendly anthem material, and the title energy works well. Queen had already done Flash Gordon, where the music is basically wall-to-wall joy and every track seems to be having the time of its life. Highlander is not that. The main song works beautifully. Some of them however are shoved into the movie with the subtlety of a broadsword through drywall.
Still, having Queen around gives Highlander a musical identity that most fantasy action films would kill for. Even when the songs are awkward, they are memorably awkward.
I also enjoyed seeing Alan North, best remembered by some of us as Frank Drebin’s partner from Police Squad!. That is the sort of thing that makes a movie like this more pleasant. You are already watching immortals cut each other’s heads off in parking garages, and then suddenly you get a nice little “Hey, it’s that guy” moment.
The Bad
The plotting is a mess. This is not a movie that flows so much as lurches. It jumps between modern New York and old Scotland with the enthusiasm of a channel surfer. The structure is not impossible to follow, but it often feels as if a longer version of the film was cut down with an axe, which, given the subject matter, at least feels thematically appropriate.
Characters appear as if we are supposed to know them, do one thing, and then vanish. Other characters seem to have been introduced for plotlines that no longer exist. At times, the film feels like a television pilot, a music video, a fantasy epic, a police procedural, and a slasher movie all wrestling for control. (Oh and there is wrestling now I think about it.)
I would also like some closure on Candy the hooker. I am not saying she needed an entire spin-off, but she seems to wander in from a more interesting cut of the movie, and then the film simply moves on. There are a lot of those moments. Highlander is filled with the ghosts of subplots.
The romance and pathos are also uneven. The film wants us to feel the burden of immortality, and in theory that should be easy. Connor MacLeod lives forever. Everyone he loves ages and dies. He has to move through time as both witness and survivor. That is potentially powerful material.
Unfortunately, the emotional weight often depends on Christopher Lambert acting sad, and that is not always the film’s strongest weapon.
The movie does better with pulp grandeur than with intimate heartbreak. The idea of Connor outliving his wife is good. The execution is sometimes moving in concept more than performance. Lambert can look haunted, but he cannot always sell the deeper ache the movie wants him to carry.
His love interests over the years also create an odd impression. One of the stranger things about Connor’s immortal life is that the women seem to get less impressive as the centuries roll on. Usually, one imagines immortality allowing a man to refine his taste. Here it feels like Connor is slowly giving up.
Christopher Lambert does not ruin the movie. In some strange ways, he helps define it. But when the film asks him to carry great romance, tragedy, and mythic longing, he sometimes looks like a man trying to remember whether he left the stove on in 1543.
The Ugly
The Big Bad (Kurgan maybe?) is one of those villains I remembered being much scarier. When I first saw Highlander, I was younger, and the Kurgan seemed huge, dangerous, and genuinely menacing. Watching the movie now, roughly forty years later… hold on, I need to breathe into a paper bag… forty years that can’t be right…. 1986 to 2026 that is more 25 years?… Where was I? Oh yes the big bad. He is still entertaining, but he is also a hilariously stupid character.
This is not to say Clancy Brown is bad. Clancy Brown goes all in. He gives the movie exactly the kind of loud, physical, lunatic villainy it needs. But the Kurgan himself is less terrifying monster and more incredible loser with a sword. He roars, sneers, terrorizes people, drives like a maniac, and generally behaves like that one guy at a biker bar who everyone has to apologize for but he is the president’s cousin or something.
He is memorable, certainly. He is just not quite the nightmare figure my younger self remembered. Adult eyes are cruel that way. They look at your childhood villains and say, “Actually, this man is an idiot.”
The movie’s mythology also lands in both the good and ugly columns. I admire the nerve of not explaining everything, but there are times when the film’s refusal to explain anything becomes comical. The Quickening is lightning? Energy? Life force? A prize? A migraine with special effects? Why swords specifically? What happens if one immortal uses a woodchipper? Are there immortal accountants? Has anyone tried diplomacy? Again, the movie does not care.
And maybe that is correct. But it does mean that Highlander often plays like the second movie in a franchise where the first movie was lost in a fire. (Joke is with Highlander it is the second movie that should have been lost in a fire)
There is also something fundamentally silly about the whole enterprise, and the film cannot always control that silliness. Sometimes the silliness is intentional. Sometimes it is accidental. Sometimes it is Sean Connery in a hat. Sometimes it is Christopher Lambert’s agape mouth. Sometimes it is a music cue that makes you wonder whether the Black Eyed Peas were somehow sent back in time.
The result is a movie that can be hard to take seriously even when it desperately wants to be taken seriously. But this is also why it works.
In Conclusion
Highlander is a very silly film. As Monty Python might say, very silly indeed.
But silly is not the same as bad. In fact, Highlander is greatly helped by its silliness. It is also helped by nostalgia, by 1980s New York, by Sean Connery being Sean Connery in a role that makes no rational sense, by Christopher Lambert being just strange enough to pass as a man unstuck from time, by Queen being Queen, and by a central concept so strong that it survives almost every absurd choice the movie makes.
This is not a clean movie. It is not a subtle movie. It is not a movie that answers your questions. It is a movie that throws immortals, sword fights, ancient rivalries, Scottish flashbacks, police investigations, big songs, and lightning explosions into a blender and then serves the result with complete confidence. There is something admirable about that.
It also remains surprisingly kid-friendly in spirit despite the rating and the decapitations. I can easily imagine younger viewers getting completely caught up in the mythos, the swords, the immortality, and the idea that somewhere out there men have been fighting across the centuries because there can only be one. That is the sort of nonsense children understand instinctively, and adults sometimes have to remember how to enjoy.
Highlander is not great because it is polished. It is great because it is weird, bold, memorable, and absolutely convinced that its nonsense matters. And for one very 1980s evening, that is enough. There can only be one. Unfortunately, there were sequels.
Rifftrax Review
RiffTrax: Highlander (1986): 8 out of 10: Mike and the boys clearly had a blast doing Highlander. They are quite observant to boot. Some of their observations such as McCloud’s love interests getting noticeably more homely as time passes or Christopher Lambert’s inability to close his mouth were cribbed from… um… inspired some of my observations above.
I laughed out loud at their observations on the regular. It is a funny riff. And it is not like Highlander did not constantly give them material to work with. The movie can be at times an embarrassment of riches.
One note, the Just the Jokes riff states that the riff is for the director’s cut. The version I watched was not labeled as such but there seemed to be no missing scenes so feel free to use it on a streaming Highlander.
