Josh and Sandell Review: Conan the Barbarian

                                   This is the audio portion of our review. Run time: 11:09

Joshua Efron: Let's get this over with.

Sandell Stangl: That's a good opening for this review.

Joshua Efron: I'm hoping we're of the same opinion on this film, because there's only one opinion I can see being harbored by sane, critical thinking human beings.

Joshua Efron: Although I was told by one of our associates that he'd become a fanatical reader if I rant about a movie you liked and get you to cry.  Which, thinking about it, that movie may have accomplished on its own.

Sandell Stangl: I did cry. They were tears of laughter though.

Sandell Stangl: That opening shot. Holy crap!

Joshua Efron: Of inside Conan's mother's the womb as the sword stabs in?  Yeah.  I'm glad you got some laughter out of it - most of my tears were more bitter than yours.

Sandell Stangl: My tears turned bitter as time went on. I'll be honest; when I went to see this movie, I had low expectations. This movie somehow did everything wrong you could possibly think of when telling a story.

Joshua Efron:  If it didn't it's only be because it made few attempts to tell a story at all.
Sandell Stangl: I don't remember any character who...wait. I don't really remember any character other than Conan. Oh yeah, there was a villain too, I guess.  Faces come up but nothing really else....

Joshua Efron: The only two... Things.... even approaching characters were the daughter of the antagonist  (Marique, the witch girl), and Conan's compatriot, who was named.... Black Guy Who Wasn't In The Film Very Much.  These two 'characters' were possibly not even two dimensional, but at least they each had an attitude to their performance, which is more than the others could claim.

Joshua Efron: Now, some of you who have seen the first movie might say that Arnold's Conan wasn't much of a character either.  That's true in that he wasn't a Developed character, but he had a identifiable "simple warrior personality", while this guy had....   Nothing, really.  He had nothing.  I'm really not an acting critic, but this guy, or at least this guy in this movie, really pretty bad.

Sandell Stangl: The only thing this Conan had going for him was his quest for revenge.

Sandell Stangl: That's all his character was.

Joshua Efron: It wasn't a - !!!!!!!!   No No No No.

Joshua Efron: There was no Quest in this movie.

Joshua Efron: We saw no Questing of any sort.  He was in a bar, saw one of the guys who killed his dad, tortured him to find out where the others were, and then suddenly he was at the next guy.  And then he was at the next guy.  And then he had sex with the female protagonist and then she walked 15 feet outside of his cabin and got kidnapped.  WTF sort of quest for revenge is that.

Joshua Efron: That's no Adventure.  That's no Quest.  Where is the travel?  Where are the sweeping hills?  Where are the true companions who stick with you through good and ill?  Where's the epic music?  Where's the battle that will change the face of the world?  In the end he wasn't getting revenge against the killer of his father, he was rescuing the girl who he... May... POSSIBLY... have been marginally fond of.

Joshua Efron: In the end of the first Conan film he walks up behind the King and Lord who killed his father, and in front of all of his followers, CHOPS HIS ****ing HEAD OFF.  What did he do in this film?  I think in the end he just shoved the antagonist off a bridge.  I can't even remember!  There certainly wasn't any understandable fight choreography that I could follow the progression of.

Joshua Efron: Which brings me to a problem with this film, and a problem with many of the action movies we've been suffered with the past 10 or so years.  In the late 80's through the 90's there was a wave of eastern influences on American action movies that really improved things.  But as the early 2000's hit another style emerged, which is the Fast and the Furious meets WWE style cinematography and actioning.

Joshua Efron: You know what I'm talking about because it's what the past 10 years have consistently inflicted upon us - complicated choreography edited with fast cuts, and shot too close in to the action for to tell what's going on.

Joshua Efron: I'm fairly convinced that this movie's gratuitous amount of blood-spraying is simply for the function of us being able to tell when someone gets hit!

Joshua Efron: There is a horseback chase seen in this movie.  It's dreadfully boring. It includes a Fast and the Furious wagon Flipping End Over End In Slow Motion shot.  Why?  How does that fit with what this movie is trying to be?

Joshua Efron: Oh but wait, you reply, this movie isn't trying to be anything.  An accurate defense, I suppose, but not a complimentary one.  This movie never even attempts to establish setting, or feeling, or tone - it's as you said a few weeks ago with Cowboys and Aliens, most films go too quickly and don't bother trying to establish anything.  This one included, and when you're dealing with a low-fantasy swords-and-sorcery type setting, you need to give us some mood and tone, or we will never get a feeling for your story.

Sandell Stangl: I joked to you before that I didn't think the movie had any writers. That they just shot a bunch of stuff and pieced it together.  Then I saw online that it had three screenwriters...

Sandell Stangl: I wish they could have at least given Conan a different "Goal" other than revenge.

Sandell Stangl: In the 1982 release his goal was revenge as well so It had already been done.

Sandell Stangl: Which is interesting because Conan was never on a quest for revenge in the original stories by Robert Howard.

Sandell Stangl: I understand the need to give him a strong motivation for a movie release so why not make up a new one for the 2011 version?

Sandell Stangl: They didn't even attempt to do that.

Joshua Efron:   I didn't know that wasn't part of the original character's story.  And you bring up a really good point about the first movie having done a quest for revenge and, as this wasn't truly a remake, why choose the same plot.

Joshua Efron: The answer is because these writers are morons.

Joshua Efron: Case in Point - The kidnap scene.

Joshua Efron: Conan and this female protagonist can't remember her name because she was no character (the movie's Wikipedia article describes her as beautiful and studious, which is strange as I don't remember her ever studying anything) have sex.  While Conan is asleep she decides to leave, for... presumably some reason.  She walks about 15 feet away and is kidnapped.

Joshua Efron: Conan wakes up.  He goes outside.  There he finds one of the finger blades worn by Marique, the antagonist's witch daughter.

Joshua Efron: A-ha!, you and Conan say, now Conan knows what happened.

Joshua Efron: ...........But let's hold on a minute, shall we.

Joshua Efron: So, Marique, one of the 2 characters who even has any personality in the film, wears these long finger-blade-things on each finger on her right hand.  In the prologue, as we see the young Marique searching for the artifact the antagonist is after, she stretches out her right hand to sense for the traces of the magic.  Likes a snakes tongue she leads with her right hand with those finger blades on them, as though they were an extension of her very senses.  We Get Close-up Shots of her Doing So.

Joshua Efron: And then later as the adult Marique, when determining which of the priestesses is of pureblood,  slices them open with one of her bladed-finger-things, and then licks the blood off it!  And then she kills the girls using them!  Kills them with these things that we keep seeing closeups of and which is obviously a part of not merely her costume but also her very character!  Her personality!  Her SELF!

Joshua Efron: AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT SHE DIDN'T NOTICE THAT ONE WAS MISSING?

Joshua Efron: It's not like she lost one in a fight and it got broken.  It's not like she was kidnapping the protagonist by herself and the protagonist used her "studious powers" to summon a ****ing bear that bit her finger off!

Joshua Efron: Her claw was Just Lying There!

Joshua Efron: And this, Sandell, is why I firmly attest that the writers were just bloody-damned Morons.

Joshua Efron: Because they could have dropped Anything.

Joshua Efron: A sword from one of the attackers.  A knife.  A pouch.  Anything that identified the antagonists as the ones having been there.

Joshua Efron: In fact, they didn't even have to identify the antagonists, because who the fuck else would have taken her but the villains who have been trying to kidnap her the entire movie!

Joshua Efron: Is that finger dagger being left behind such an undefeatable problem that it would have ruined the movie had the movie otherwise been good?  No.  It still would have been bewilderingly Dumb, but this problem would not have ruined the movie had the movie been good.

Joshua Efron: It is, however, the proof of the absolute incompetence of the writers and the Director, And Director, SIR, of this film.  The writers because no one should ever, EVER make a choice that Blatently Contrary to their own characters, and the director because he Never should have allowed it to have made such awful writing off the page and into the film.  Some bad choices may be small in scope but monolithic in the Sheer Idiocy of their (lack of) reasoning.

Sandell Stangl: And you know that the writers, director, and other people who had creative power on this film were probably sitting in a room going "How about she drops her finger knife thing and Conan picks it up"? And another guy said "Yeah! That's brilliant, Conan will know that SHE was there and go and save the girl!" And then the director said "You have a gift my friend!"

Sandell Stangl: And immediately after that, another devastating natural disaster happened.

Sandell Stangl: Maybe that's why we've had so many this year?

Sandell Stangl: I'm gonna blame this movie for them.

Joshua Efron: I'm going to blame them on the end of the new Ghost Rider trailer.

Sandell Stangl: Oh god, let's talk about that in the audio portion of this review.