Conan the Destroyer

After a fairly mediocre Conan the Barbarian, I thought it would be only fair to watch “Conan the Destroyer”. But went into this movie knowing I was going to be disappointed. But I had no clue on how bad it actually was going to be. I was hoping they would have fixed some of the complaints I had about the first movie. But no, I was correct on how terrible it actual was. But more on that after the jump.

The story continues on after the previous one, where Conan is praying with his companion Malak, a foolish thief. This is when a few men on horses try to capture Conan and inevitably fail. The horsemen were sent by Queen Taramis who needs Conan to complete a quest; to protect Princess Jehnna as she retrieves a special jewel only she can touch. After Conan initially refuses the Queen finds out, using her special powers, Conan’s deepest desires of how he wants Valeria back. She uses this to persuade him by saying she can bring Valeria back. As the group consisting of the Princess, her body guard Bombatta, Zulu, Malak, Akiro and of course Conan goes on their quest, Conan finds out the real motives behind the Queen and it is up to him to serve justice.

The young Princess Jehnna

A few things I found tolerable in this movie is that the movie is a lot shorter compared to the first one. This means it has a lot less filler scenes, or so I thought. I later found out that to make the movie PG, they cut some of the violent parts of the movie out. So I was wrong, there still is a lot of boring scenes and less cool fight scenes. Last fun part of this movie is the cool monster concept they had … too bad the costumes looked dreadful and overall gave it a comical feel. It was really hard to take the monsters seriously, actually it was hard to take anything from this movie seriously.
But this movie is generally pretty bad, all the complaints from the first movie are here. And to add on to the problems, I didn’t notice it too much in the first movie. But this one has a terrible score, it only has one theme song, and they loop it a lot in the movie. Also, the movie does not feel very fluid. There is a lot of bad editing and it seems at time they just teleport everywhere. Though this is funny because I was complaining that the previous movie had to much walking-filler moments. There is no fine balance I find.
Lastly I want to talk about the characters. A few cool notes, both Grace Jones, who plays Zulu: a female warrior who accompanies Conan. And Wilt Chamberlain is in this movie, he plays Bombaata, who is the body guard for Princess Jehnna. They do a decent enough job supporting Conan. The character I found a slight hatred for is Malak. He plays this dumb theif that is Conan’s friend, for some god forsaken reason. They must of put this character in the movie as a comic relief, but he doesn’t do that. If anything he makes me mad and furious about the movie.

The Queen as she explains the situation for Conan.

To summarize, this movie stinks. It doesn’t hold up over the time, and I bet this movie was pretty terrible when it came out. There is very little admirable feature in Conan the Destroyer. If I were you, and you did not check out any of the Conan movies, I would tell you to skip them both. There is nothing entertaining about the Conan movies. I just hope the new one changes that.