The Highlander franchise is one of the more curious ones in film. It has now featured five films, two TV series, one animated cartoon, and soon two video games. Through all of that, it has managed to produce very little entertainment of quality. The newest film, Highlander: The Source, is sadly the franchise’s darkest moment.
That may sounds shocking to some, as surely Highlander II: The Quickening is worse, right? No, in fact, The Source makes The Quickening seem almost brilliant in comparison. The two films start similarly, with The Source also taking a strange jump into a dark future. Our first glimpse of original series star Duncan MacLeod is as a roof dwelling good doer. He’s a cross between Batman and Angel from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.
That could be overlooked, but soon Duncan disappears from the movie and we begin following another character as he attempts to break into some random building in order to make a phone call. To show the film’s cleverness, his password is “There can be only one.” He is soon dispatched by the film’s main villain, The Guardian, a sort of wise-cracking Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Oh, one more thing, he can move super fast. Why? Well, that is never really explained, but it is implied it has something to do with The Source in the title.
What is The Source? Again, it is never really explained except to reference it as the Holy Grail of Immortals. Soon Duncan joins up with Joe Dawson and Methos (also of series fame), as well as two other immortals to search out and find The Source in order to prevent the coming apocalypse. Does that sound a little confusing? It gets better. The ragtag team of heroes eventually battle cannibals and find themselves stripped of one of their greatest gifts. By the time the ending comes you are more thankful than excited, but then it manages to trump the badness of the rest of the movie with one of the most anticlimactic voiceovers scenes to ever be put on film.
Now that you know the goofiness of the film, why is it exactly so bad? After all, all the Highlander films have been kind of silly. Not like this they haven’t. The film jumps into a sort of near future wasteland of a city with no real explanation of how society got there. This would usually not be too big a deal in a sci-fi movie, except when last seen Duncan was in everyday modern society. There’s just disconnect there for audiences. The villain doesn’t help, either. While the Kurgan and every other Highlander villain has been over the top, this one seems like Robin Williams created him. He’s silly for no reason and at no point actually scary. You’ll laugh at him more than you’ll ever worry for the heroes.
Then there’s Methos. He was the smooth, sophisticated antihero of the series, and here? Here he’s angry with Duncan, but no one ever bothers to explain why. He has perhaps five lines of dialogue throughout the entire film. That’s actually not too bad for this film, however, as none of the characters do much talking. Instead, most of the story is told through music video montages. There’s a part about halfway through the film where it at least feels like they drive in a car for ten minutes with nothing happening. Of course, this is to say nothing of the lack of any real sword fights in the movie. The traditional action draw of Highlander is replaced with special effect trickery, instead.
Highlander: The Source isn’t just the worst of the Highlander franchise, but it very well might be the worst film you will see all year. Actually, hopefully you will save your time and money and avoid it completely. Rent The Quickening instead. You’ll enjoy it more.
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By Rick Cain on Mar 2, 2008 | Reply
It did suck, and hard. I think they need to tell directors that their target audience demographic is not 13 year old boys with ninja fantasies, but older people in their mid-30’s who like plot and storytelling in their movie.