‘I luxuriate in the weird details': why Highlander is my feelgood movie

The Guardian

2 days ago

With all due respect to Flash Gordon, there is only room in my heart for one maximalist 1980s movie blending science fiction, fantasy and romance with a banging Queen soundtrack. That film is Highlander, the stylised but strangely lofty 1986 wannabe blockbuster with a premise so ridiculous – immortals tussle throughout human history in a beheading battle royale – it is often deployed as a pop culture punchline. (In the Nascar comedy Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Will Ferrell's blowhard racer confidently asserts that Highlander won the Academy Award for 'best movie ever made'.)
Even Highlander's production history sounds like a mistranslated joke about national stereotypes walking into a bar. Australian director Russell Mulcahy chose French-American actor Christopher Lambert to embody the titular mythic Scottish hero, then cast actual mythic Scottish hero Sean Connery as his preening Egyptian turned Spaniard mentor. But the key to unlocking the mood-improving pleasures of Mulcahy's offbeat epic is not to stress too much about the arcane mythology or hopscotching chronology. For all its sweeping romanticism about love and loss down the centuries, it is a film suffused with a quirky self-awareness beneath the 1980s music video sheen.
Of course, if you are actually Scottish then Highlander has probably always felt like a comedy. The handsomely mounted historical flashback scenes that begin in 1538 show the bawdy bustle of Highland life on the banks of a bonny loch. But when Lambert's strapping young warrior Connor MacLeod seems to come back from the dead – shrugging off a brutal battlefield impaling by burly baddie the Kurgan (Clancy Brown) – his clan turns against him with a manic zeal worthy of Monty Python. 'He's in league with Lucifer!' screams Connor's formerly coy sweetheart Kate (Celia Imrie) as he is violently ejected from their village.
In the present day of 1985, the rough-hewn Highlander MacLeod has evolved into slick New York antiques dealer Russell Nash, the beneficiary of over 400 years of life experience and one crash course in the esoteric rules of being an immortal from Connery's dandyish charmer Ramirez. The accumulated psychological weight of those centuries feels palpable when MacLeod broods alone in a secret sanctum stacked with keepsakes, or noses an ancient brandy and drifts off into a reverie remembering the year that Mozart composed his Great Mass. But there is mirth amid the melancholy. When MacLeod notices a tacky illustration of a kilted Scot, he stares straight into the camera and offers a knowing eyebrow waggle worthy of Groucho Marx.
New York is the backdrop for the fabled Gathering, where immortals must congregate for a bloodthirsty conclave that will leave only one to claim the mystical Prize. It ends up being a spectacular rematch between MacLeod and the Kurgan on the roof of Silvercup Studios in Queens (neither the Kurgan nor the famous Silvercup sign survive the encounter). That climactic sword battle – with its eerie, swirling optical effects that signify the Quickening, a sort of magical defibrillator of immortal energy – was easily the high point of Highlander on my initial viewings.
But now the narrative arc has become so familiar I luxuriate in the weird details and eccentric characters in the margins: the fish flopping out of MacLeod's kilt as he emerges bedraggled from a loch; the sarcastic hotdog vendor making fun of the New York cops baffled by a sudden outbreak of decapitations; the unmistakably towering Kurgan turning up with a newly shaved head and purring: 'I'm in disguise!'
Even the ultimate Prize turns out to be a sly cosmic joke. It grants MacLeod the superpower of being able to read the minds of everyone on the planet, nominally equipping him to usher in a new spirit of global cooperation between 'presidents, diplomats and scientists'. But it also makes him mortal and finally able to father a child. For the lonely MacLeod, newly hooked up with foxy metallurgist Brenda (Roxanne Hart), it is all he could have wished for. But it's worth noting that if the despicable Kurgan had triumphed he would have had all of humanity inanely chattering in his head while he grappled with his own impending death. That would have been pretty funny too.
The snarky criticism most often levelled at Highlander is that the film's signature battle cry – 'There can be only one!' – was soon undercut by a parade of wobbly movie sequels and a surprisingly durable TV spin-off. A long-in-the-works cinematic reboot from the John Wick director Chad Stahelski with Henry Cavill attached to star is rumoured to begin shooting later this year and the temptation will surely be to leave the 1980s visual stylings behind and amp up the violence. But if Stahelski and Cavill genuinely want to honour the charming spirit of the original they should consider updating the mantra: there can be only fun.
Highlander is available on Amazon Prime in the US and is rent digitally in the UK and Australis