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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Conan The Barbarian (3D) (Film)

by Erin Free | August 16, 2011 19:59 | Edited August 16, 2011 20:43

…violent, fast-paced, and half-mad.

Thanks to the likes of the risible Clash Of The Titans, the far superior Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, and the poorly received parody, Your Highness, one of cinema's most maligned genres - the fantasy, sword-and-sorcery flick, made most popular in the eighties - has been experiencing something of a rebirth lately. Compared to that decade's most ferocious warhorses (think The Sword & The Sorcerer and The Beastmaster), however, these new millennium efforts have been a bit, well, soft. Enter Conan The Barbarian, the latest big screen take on the iconic character created by author Robert E. Howard, who eventually successfully found his way into the pages of Marvel Comics. Replete with decapitations, suggested disembowelments, torture, nostril harassment, battlefield dismemberments, and other gory delights, Conan The Barbarian is what a good sword-and-sorcery flick should be: violent, fast-paced, and half-mad.

 

Director Marcus Nispel showed a rare facility for blood-and-guts action with 2007's vicious, hugely underrated Pathfinder, which ingeniously (if not exactly innovatively) pitted Native Americans against Vikings in a horrific tableaux of carnage rarely seen in mainstream cinema. He's the perfect choice to helm Conan The Barbarian, the hot, heaving tale of a boy born on the battlefield (no, really, literally...it's the best birth scene since Knocked Up), who grows into an unmatched warrior (Jason Momoa) who spends his entire life chasing revenge on the brutal Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), the man responsible for his father's (Ron Perlman) death.

 

Though in most films such a skeletal narrative would spell disaster, it actually works perfectly for Conan The Barbarian. This is a no-frills action experience so fast paced that it leaves no room for high falutin' clap trap like introspection and ambiguity, and Nispel sensibly makes no effort to modernise the brutish, boorish Conan, whose caveman-like demeanour is actually part of his muscular appeal. "I live, I love, I slay...I am content," he says in a rare moment of thumbnail self-analysis. The handsome, charismatic Jason Momoa (Stargate: Atlantis) admirably commits to the role of Conan 100%, and makes for a likeable, impressively physical hard-man hero, while simultaneously injecting finely judged jolts of humour into his essentially one-note character. Momoa receives solid support from the lovely Rachel Nichols as his feisty romantic interest, Tamara, while wearing the black hats, Stephen Lang and Rose McGowan (as Khalar Zym's eyebrow-less, creepy sorceress daughter, with whom the villain seems to enjoy an, ahem, unconventional relationship) chew the scenery with entertaining, inventive, bang-on relish.

 

As originally designed by Robert E. Howard, the world of Conan The Barbarian was an ugly and violent one, and Marcus Nispel captures much of that greasy, mud-crunched viscera here. Though he fails to work up any truly unforgettable set pieces to rival director John Milius' inspired visions on his big-and-bold 1981 cult hit, Conan The Barbarian (which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role), Nispel certainly succeeds in making a gutsy, ballsy, bloody action-adventure flick worthy of its central character's towering, archetypal mythos.