HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING
A film review by Jonathan Knight
Copyright 1991 Jonathan Knight
I went to see the sequel to HIGHLANDER last night, and I can honestly say it is very irritating. HIGHLANDER was "a kind of magic" where the mystery was maintained throughout the film, the characters were intelligent and the film made an effort to make us believe what we were seeing. HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING makes no effort along these lines and in fact appears to have been written by someone who didn't watch the first film carefully.
The plot is simple: the world has lost its ozone layer and people are dying from UV radiation from the sun. McCloud has developed some ingenious device which places a "shield" around the earth to block off the UV radiation. We see it switched on and then skip 25 years into the future where we find the shield is blocking all light from the sun and stars and an evil company now controls the shield. The countries of the world pay the shield company to keep the radiation from their people and so this company has something of a monopoly. The world is a depressing place which is in constant darkness and decay.
Having got the plot out of the way in about six minutes (including the credits) and about four sentences of meaningful dialogue, the film starts to destroy the magic of the first film. Firstly we find out that McCloud is in fact an alien from the planet Zeiss and together with a bunch of rebels (including Ramirez) was banished to earth. When only one rebel was left on earth the winner would gain the prize; either be mortal on earth (no mention this time of the "knowledge") or return to Zeiss. Before McCloud is captured on Zeiss, he and Ramirez go through a ceremony called the quickening in which they both dunk their fingers in a pot of water.
This basic plot causes a whole bunch of problems. How was Ramirez sent to a different point in time to McCloud? This planet doesn't have time travel and all the other transfers arrive together. How come McCloud doesn't recognise Ramirez in the first film if in fact they were fairly good friends to start off with? How come the villagers in Scotland didn't notice McCloud didn't have a Scottish accent when he turned up? Why did he have to be taught to sword fight when that was the main weapon they used on Zeiss? McCloud had the prize and knew what everyone was thinking, home come he only solved the ozone problem, what about war and famine, are we to believe he didn't turn his talent to those problems after he perfected the shield?
Obviously, with McCloud aging and all the other immortals dead, the film then decides its time to add some action. The ruler of the planet Zeiss (General something or other) decides that he doesn't want McCloud back on Zeiss and so sends out a couple of guys to wipe him out. McCloud dispatches them and because they were immortals, he too becomes immortal again and returns to being the age he was when he lost his immortality. So the General decides to turn up and do the job himself. He decides to take over the shield company for no reason that is explained or even questioned during the film and then McCloud and he fight it out--guess who wins. Having done this McCloud then destroys the shield (he has found out along the way that the ozone layer has repaired itself) and so we wait for HIGHLANDER III.
Ramirez is reincarnated by McCloud and helps out in a few bits and pieces along the way. Nothing significant--basically he's the comic interlude.
There is a female in the film, basically a blonde bimbo terrorist who demonstrates no intelligence, to whom McCloud is attracted. It is she who discovers the ozone layer is back when she and a bunch of friends break into the control room for the shield and take a reading. She then follows McCloud around for the rest of the movie.
There are many bits of the film that are just done for effect. When the general arrives, he lands on earth in a tube train (that's subway train for the Americans) and decides that he wants some new clothes. So he kills the nearest guy wearing something he likes. Then he decides to drive the train:
General: "I bet you've always wanted to drive one of these?" Some poor kid he has by the neck nods. General: "Me too."
A curious statement as he's just arrived from a planet where there was no evidence of anything that even looked like an American subway train. He then manages to get the train up to 400 miles per hour, gets it to look like a Catherine wheel and then ploughs it through a brick wall in which it stops after about 30 feet without even a dent to the driver's cabin.
The special effects are all done to excess; they are also very poor. The flight scenes between McCloud and the immortal assassins are done by speeding the film up. This presumably was done to make some fast action; however, the camera moves too fast making it hard to follow and the flying is jerky and has no grace. Some scenes are shown at normal speed and this gives a far better impression of the gracefulness of a sword fight in the air.
The scenes where McCloud kills an immortal are seriously overdone. In the first HIGHLANDER there were usually a few things moving and a few cars going bang. In this one he has the effect of a fairly large bomb. Everything within 100 yards bursts into flames including all the cars, most of the buildings and a petrol tanker that happened to be passing. The death toll should have been about 100, but it seems McCloud wasn't worried about all this destruction he had just wreaked, and calmly walks away.
So here are the movie goofs I spotted. Firstly the script. Secondly, when the general is transported to earth, you see his ungloved hand just before he disappears--when he arrives on earth it is gloved. When McCloud and Ramirez go to the maximum-security prison then are machine-gunned, we see McCloud's door open and he is shown taking lots of bullets on the floor. When the bimbo is taken from the boot she looks into the car and McCloud is now comfortable in his seat and the door is closed. I also got confused between the max-security prison and the shield. It seems that at the end these are the same place and yet I got the impression they were supposed to be separate.
In conclusion this is a reasonable film, but a very poor sequel. For that reason I'd score it -2 on a scale of -4 to +4.
-- ______ JANET :jonathan@uk.ac.keele.cs Jonathan Knight, / BITNET:jonathan%cs.kl.ac.uk@ukacrl Department of Computer Science / _ __ other :jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk University of Keele, Keele, (_/ (_) / / UUCP :...!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan Staffordshire. ST5 5BG. U.K.
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