Highlander II (Renegade Version)

Only available now in a reorganised edit called the Renegade Version, Russell Mulcahy's mid-90s director's cut (which was further tweaked with CG additions focused around the film's light palette and background plates in the early 2000s) of Highlander II seeks to mitigate the wilful damage perpetrated on the series by a bizarre theatrical release that - in a rough, up-front, spill of treacly exposition - demanded viewers now consider Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery's immortal swordsmen as deposed alien warlords, banished to our planet for the crime of mounting a deeply unsuccessful insurrection. Mulcahy's subsequent assemblies junk this intergalactic aspect, tweaking the story so the film's fallen future has roots in some long-forgotten, technologically advanced, Earth-based civilisation; one that apparently predates women (but not the Genbaku Dome). 

Although ill-considered these attempts to reframe Highlander in sweeping, science fiction, terms are at least audacious. They represents a colossal overhaul of expectation that, surely, tracks into an expanding, operatic, canvas? Not a bit of it. The distant past and Planet Zeist both serve the same mechanical function - they provide a separate location from which enemies with similar abilities to our heroes can invade from. Highlander II barely even plugs into the promise of further battles between semi-invincible swordsmen. Only three immortals cross over, two airborne splatter-punks (quickly dispatched) and Michael Ironside's cackling General Katana. Given that the film is set forty years after the first, trapped in a ruin organically connected to MacLeod's interpretation of The Prize, why not make Connor's foes a trio of immortals born (or realised through the kind of near death Connor suffered on a 16th century battlefield) too late to stake a claim on their birth right? 

Youth and bitterness could be stressed; a rootless fanaticism aimed directly at MacLeod, an ageing relic who, quite apparently, has sucked the life force out of countless rivals (and perhaps even the world itself) then squandered this unfathomable triumph by allowing himself to moulder. Unfortunately Highlander II betrays no such interest, battering through half-formed characters and orphaned scenes until it reaches a state of conceptual tedium. The film even in its longest, most complete form is clearly unfinished, lacking not just basic transitional and connective information but, obviously, entire episodes. It's a lumpen, discursive, film then but this misbegotten sequel is home to one genuinely spectacular sequence - a metamorphosis that sees a wheezing, decrepit, MacLeod see off multiple assassins to stand dead centre in a series of thunderous detonations that bestow upon him the smirking vigour he allowed to slip away. MacLeod immediately takes advantage of this rejuvenation to hurl himself, pelvis first, at Virginia Madsen's Louise Marcus, the beautiful (but completely underwritten) terrorist who had, just minutes earlier, been demanding that this shuffling old Highlander stand to attention.