Conan the Barbarian / The Guard

A little bit of a David v Goliath competition this evening with a dinky Irish film competing for my attention against a meaty Hollywood blockbuster. Which will win out?

Conan the Barbarian

“By Crom!”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: barbarian loses family and swears vengeance on the baddie who killed them

See it if you  like: muscley men with long hair hitting people with things

If there’s one good thing to say about Conan the Barbarian, it’s that it isn’t a remake of the old Arnie films. Given the huge detailed history given to Conan by his creator, Robert E. Howard, and successive authors following on from him there is plenty to draw from. How, then, did we end up with such a dull and vapid tale as this one?

Jason Momoa is passable as the bulky Cimmerian, though his facial expressions seem to range from annoyed to angry and not an awful lot else. Mind, this is a little better than Leo Howard who plays Conan as a youth and who seems to have modelled his part on some kind of pissed-off wolf cub. With a pet lip.

The film shows its cheesy intentions from the opening sequence where Conan is born and held aloft on the battlefield. Well, a really shitty obviously rubber fake baby is held aloft anyway. While dad (Ron Perlman) roars. As you do on a battlefield when people are running around you with big bloody swords.

As far as plot goes, it’s about as deep as the 80′s versions. That is to say as deep as a thin film of water spilled on your worktop. It’s pretty predictable, the characters are just as shallow and the action sequences are about the only thing to alleviate the tedium. The “sand creatures” which appear in one sequence are particularly well done, although I swear the exact same piece of footage of a creature jumping in the air is used about five times.

Yeah, you may have guessed I wasn’t that impressed. Gillian summed it up:

“Even Red Sonja was better than that.”

The Guard

“I can’t tell if you’re really motherfucking dumb, or reallymotherfucking smart.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: A member of the Garda comes up against some seriously nasty drug smugglers.

See it if you like: Good British (yes, I know, it’s Irish but the style’s the same) detective dramas with a heavy hand of quirk.

And here’s David. All set up with a large Irish sling with which to smack Goliath firmly in the temple. $6m up against $90m. That’s a big gulf to cross. How could it possibly hope to compete?

The most simple answer is – by having a far superior script. The Guard actually has a great story. And some wonderful characters, one in particular – Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson). The quote above comes from Don Cheadle‘s FBI agent shortly into the film and I was actually thinking this about Boyle shortly before the question is raised. He’s a wonderfully written enigma and portrayed perfectly by Gleeson.

So, what happens? Boyle is a police officer in the arse end of nowhere in West Ireland. Cheadle arrives with information about some rather nasty drug dealers in the area and things kick off. This isn’t Lethal Weapon in scale, and the humour is far darker than you’d get in most Hollywood movies. In fact, the closest I can think of offhand is In Bruges which, coincidentally I assume, also stars Gleeson.

If I have an issue it’s that the film seems to try too hard to be funny at the start with a bit too much in the way of bad language and forced humour. Once things settle down, roughly around the time Cheedle’s character appears, the humour settles in and becomes far more natural.

As well as the crime and laughs, there’s a lovely side-story relating to Boyle’s mother who is dying of cancer. There’s no real reason for this little splinter of a story to be there other than to develop the protagonist’s personality. And it works.

It’s films like this that restore my faith in cinema at times. Please, if you have the choice of only catching some stupid sword and sandals flick (even worse, the aforementioned crock in 3-flipping-D) and this little pearl, hand your coins to David so he can load them into his sling.

Related articles

• Conan the Barbarian – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Conan the Barbarian (ypsichik.com)
• Movie Fanatic Reviews: Conan the Barbarian, One Day (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• Conan The Barbarian, review (telegraph.co.uk)
• ‘Conan the Barbarian’ is all blood and no story (today.msnbc.msn.com)
• ‘Conan the Barbarian’ Review (screenrant.com)
• Conan the Barbarian, A movie review about a great movie from Unofficial Games (zzarchov.blogspot.com)
• The Guard: The most arresting cop film of the year? (telegraph.co.uk)

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