Conan the Destroyer is a better movie than its predecessor, Conan the Barbarian, for three reasons. The first is that there is weight behind the action scenes; it feels as if sword actually hits flesh when we see it on-screen. The second is how much more comfortable Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed in his role as the titular character. The final reason is that there’s no back story to Conan. What we see here is what we get — it’s like his past doesn’t exist.

This time around, Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) begins sitting in a field. A queen named Taramis (Sarah Douglas) finds him and tells him that his assistance is required. Her niece, Jehnna (Olivia d’Abo) is prophesied to go on a quest to get a MacGuffin because, well, that’s the purpose of a MacGuffin, isn’t it? So Conan embarks on a journey to make sure that Jehnna accomplishes her task, under the promise that the Queen will bring back his dead lover, Valeria. However, what he doesn’t see, but we do, is that the Queen plans to sacrifice her niece and kill Conan after the MacGuffin is retrieved.

Along the way, other people join them on the journey. Wilt Chamberlain (yes, the basketball player) is another one of Jehnna’s bodyguards, and along the way, a tribal warrior named Zoula (Grace Jones) joins them. It’s an interesting cast, doing menial tasks that follow exactly the story that is described off the bat. There are absolutely no twists scattered throughout, which is too bad, because it wouldn’t have felt as formulaic. Everything that the Queen describes at the beginning happens, all the way up to the ending, which is where I’ll stop describing. You probably won’t be surprised by how it ends though.

As I said earlier, the action scenes are much better this time around, and they’re also more plentiful. The plot is mostly just an excuse to have Conan going around killing people, but since they’re entertaining, that’s fine with me. Unlike in Conan the Barbarian, it actually looked like people were getting hit by the swords. The fight choreography, while still not great, is at least somewhat inventive, even if it does often feel like a wrestling match with swords involved.

I actually liked Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of Conan. He didn’t seem like he felt lost this time around, which is really helpful the production. He didn’t appear to have as much difficulty swinging a sword in a believable way, nor did he have as much trouble delivering his lines, even if he isn’t given much to say. He is a barbarian after all.

Conan the Destroyer is a much more light-hearted movie than its predecessor as well. It embraces how cheesy it is, and has a bunch of comedic moments. For example, before the first 30 minutes are over, Conan has already punched two animals. If for no other reason than this, it’s more enjoyable than the first Conan because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Just like Conan the Barbarian, this is far too long a movie to maintain complete attention. There are a bunch of times when I felt like I was nodding off, especially after the fight with the most ridiculous monster ever. After this part, it felt like Conan the Destroyer was coming unhinged, and it lost focus of what it was trying to do.

Speaking of a ridiculous monster, this one was incredibly silly because of its weakness. The wizard living there summons it, and despite looking pretty silly when we first see it, we learn that swords cannot damage it. So Conan has to try to discover how to kill it. The weakness ends up being the surrounding mirrors. Destroying them ends up harming the monster. I’m not making this up, and it was at this point when I stopped caring about or believing in this production.

It still never completely stops being entertaining though, which is something that Conan the Barbarian couldn’t say. Even if there are a few moments where this film drags, it still manages to have something going on that will hold your interest. The plot certainly can’t do that, and action scenes that are limited to sword fights end up boring after a while. I think it’s the world that this film inhabits, and the interesting secondary characters, that keep your attention.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I liked how there wasn’t any depth to the characters, especially with the one of Conan. He’s a man who just wants to kill people and get his dead lover back, and that’s all I need to know. Anything else would be redundant information, and I’m glad it wasn’t included. We don’t need him to grow or have a deep back story, and we don’t get that. Secondary characters don’t grow either, but they’re more interesting than Conan to begin with, despite being less prominently featured.

Even though I found Conan the Destroyer to be better than its predecessor, it still wasn’t a great movie. It was too predictable and often too uninteresting to be worthwhile, but there’s also some fun to be had. The action scenes actually feel like people are hitting one another, Schwarzenegger was a less awkward actor, while not having Conan be anything more than a hunk with a wish to kill others was a good decision. It just wasn’t great. It was a better movie than Conan the Barbarian though, although that’s not necessarily saying much.

Conan the Barbarian serves as both an origin story for its titular hero, as well as giving him one mission to go on while he’s at it. That mission involves rescuing a woman and enacting revenge upon the person who decided it would be a fun idea to kill everyone in his village when he was a boy. It’s just too bad that not all that much of this film is actually much fun to watch.

The origin story begins with Conan and his father sitting on a mountaintop, talking about life, and how the only thing that you can trust is your sword. That makes me question if you can trust the person who tells you that, unless of course they’re made of steel as well. Then, a bunch of people come and attack the village the Conan lives in, killing everyone but the children, who become enslaved instead. The only boy we see after that moment is Conan though, so I assumed that the other children all died of starvation, instead of being taken away and forced to do things that aren’t pushing a device around and around for years. Decide for yourself, but I will say that keeping a bunch of young boys around is just a little creepy.

Regardless, we watch the young Conan push the device called the “Wheel of Pain” for years. And then he magically transforms into the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger, something he should be thanking Crom, his god, for. He gets forced into becoming an arena fighter, and like you’d expect, he wins them all. He’s even given reading material and woman to occupy his time. That sounds like a pretty good life for a slave. Eventually, he’s freed for no reason, finds a sword a companion (Gerry Lopez), and decides to become a thief. Eventually, he finds another thief, a woman named Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), and they end up in a relationship because, well, why not? Oh, and he also winds up finding a wizard (Mako), who doesn’t really do much, but serves as our narrator.

So now that we’ve got a good idea of our cast, we need a story. Just watching muscular people going around stealing things wouldn’t make a good movie, would it? Well, maybe it would. Actually, that might have been more enjoyable than what we ended up with. However, director Oliver Stone didn’t think that was the case, so we get a plot. The group winds up getting captured, and are told that they must rescue a King’s daughter, who happens to have been captured by Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), the man who led the assault against Conan’s village. So, we get a castle siege movie for the final hour, with multiple reasons for Conan to kill people.

We don’t actually get as many action scenes as you’d expect. Or maybe it just didn’t feel that way, considering how long Conan the Barbarian drags on. This is a movie that lasts more than two hours, but had no excuse to go over 90 minutes. There’s a lot of scenes that made me question why they were included, and I often questioned why things took as long as they did to happen. I think I just don’t have the right vision of Conan as a character, but I just don’t see why someone like him would sneak around for five minutes before going into an action scene, since that part is inevitable anyway. Look at him! He shouldn’t be sneaking around, he should be charging headfirst into battle. We know that he’s the best warrior around, so he should just go finish the job.

When we get to action scenes, they weren’t all that impressive anyway. There’s one thing that Conan is missing, and that’s a little thing called “collision detection”, something that I deem important in action movies. See, when Conan swings a sword, you know that it won’t actually hit the other actor. But when you see it on-screen, you want it to feel like it’s hitting the other person, even if it isn’t actually. I can’t recall a single moment where it was convincing that swords were hitting flesh. The fight choreography was also pretty poor, and it felt like they were making up the action scenes as they went.

At this point in his career, Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t have a large acting resume. While he had the body to play Conan, he seemed awkward no matter what he did. Delivering lines came across as weird, while even swinging a sword didn’t feel quite right. He often looked lost, and I’m unsure of how much direction he was given. Nobody else was much better, but since they weren’t on-screen as often, they weren’t as noticeable.

There just isn’t that much fun to be had with Conan the Barbarian. Since the action scenes aren’t well-made, and the plot is far too long, it’s often difficult to stay awake. I shouldn’t be bored while watching an action/adventure movie, but I was while watching this one. It probably should have ended up being solely about revenge, which might have made it better. I guess I have to disagree more with the choices made in its creation more than anything else, because it’s the decisions that end up harming it.

There’s also the fact that the world that Conan inhabits is far more interesting than he is. Conan is a lug, one with a questionable grasp of the English language, and whose thoughts involve lying with women or killing people. The world, on the other hand, contains magic, people who can turn into snakes, and a bunch of other cool things that I wanted to see more of. A mokumentary tour of this world would have been more fun than the movie we ended up getting.

In the end, I didn’t have much fun with Conan the Barbarian. The action scenes have no weight to them, the plot has far too much redundancies and tiresome moments, and Conan isn’t all that interesting of a person. I wanted more of the world, and less of Arnold Schwarzenegger looking awkward on-screen. It seemed like a lot of poor choices were made in this production, ones that made it too long and boring to be worth a watch. Conan is once asked “what is best in life?” Well, Conan, it’s not you.

The Tourist is a romantic action-comedy with little action, little comedy and even less romance. It plays out a lot more like a joke film rather than a serious picture, but it didn’t seem like anyone involved knew this. As a result, they play everything straight, but the film doesn’t feel that way to the audience, making it feel like everyone is out of place. In essence, The Tourist is a drama, but since all of the actors appear as if they thought it was a serious romantic action-comedy, everything falls flat.

Opening in Paris, we see a woman named Elise (Angelina Jolie) walking. She’s being followed, although it’s unclear if she knows this. She sits at a restaurant, and receives a letter. It’s from her husband, Alexander Pearce. It tells her that she’s being followed, and that she should take a train, find someone on this train who looks similar to what he looks like, and make it seem like they are an item. Apparently, Elise isn’t the one that is wanted, but it is instead Alexander.

Enter Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), who is the pawn that Elise chooses. He’s unassuming and seemingly completely confused when it comes to communicating with another human being. And he smokes electronic cigarettes, reads mystery novels and squints a lot. Elise eventually takes him to a hotel in Venice, kisses him on the porch to allow others to see, and effectively leaves him to be captured the next morning. We find out that Alexander stole some money from a mobster and also owes over $1 billion dollars to the government in taxes. Everyone but Elise thinks that Frank is Alexander, and the rest of the film consists of Frank trying to prove himself innocent, other people trying to capture him and kill Elise, and a couple of twists that you’ll probably see coming but are still decent enough revelations.

There are a few moments where The Tourist works. It is worth watching when shots of Venice or Paris are shown, which are used primarily as transition sequences. The scenery is nice, and if you want a small sight-seeing tour, then this film will satisfy that desire. These are pretty much the only moments that are worth watching though, because the rest of the film is either uninteresting or confusing. The latter refers not only to the story, but also for some of the actors.

It didn’t really seem like any of the actors understood what type of film they are making. Jolie spent the entire film walking in slow motion, seeming as proper and elite as she could. Oh, and she has an English accent for little reason other than to sound more like a queen, I figure. Depp is the straight man, who doesn’t quite seem to like what’s going on, because he is innocent, but goes along with it anyway because that’s his role in the film. His actions rarely make sense if you think about it, but thinking about his actions is probably something you don’t want to spend much time on.

Instead, you should think about how preposterous the plot is, and more importantly, how such good actors were cast in supporting roles. Chasing Frank are two actors who are fairly well-known. The first is Paul Bettany, playing a police inspector. I guess his casting makes sense, because he doesn’t always choose the best projects. The second is Timothy Dalton, who I was incredibly shocked to see, and who really should have stayed away from this project. But then again, so should have the leads, so I suppose it does make sense. Money talks, right?

I mentioned that The Tourist fails to fulfill any of the genres that it is featured in. Let’s dissect each genre and explain why it isn’t satisfied. Firstly, the romance involved includes a nice dinner and a few kisses, most of which occur in a dream sequence. The two leads have no real chemistry, which makes the already lackluster romance feel like it possibly should have been removed altogether.

Second are the action scenes, of which there are only a couple as well. There is a chase scene, and another chase scene, and, well, that’s about it. One of these is on-foot, and the other takes place with boats. This is Venice, after all. Neither of these are all that entertaining, and neither is all that fun to watch. They also don’t add anything to the film, because they aren’t thrilling enough to excite the audience.

Finally is the comedy aspect. Don’t make me laugh! Whatever humor the film has comes directly from how crazy the plot is, how out of place the actors are and how poor everything ends up being. I wasn’t laughing with the film, I was laughing at it. Sometimes, films attempt this, but this isn’t one of them. It’s too serious to make me think that it wanted us to make fun of it.

The Tourist isn’t exciting, thrilling, romantic or funny, which means it doesn’t do enough right to make us feel anything for it. The leads seem lost, have no chemistry, and don’t seem to be into the project all that much. The only good thing about this film is the scenery of Paris and Venice, but since we don’t get many shots of just the scenery, and are instead forced to watch good actors do things that they don’t believe in.

I suppose that The Quick and the Dead should be commended for at the very least trying something different in a genre that often feel stale. Westerns often seem to fall into the same cliches over and over again, rarely seeing a lot of new developments. While The Quick and the Dead certainly falls into some cliches, it did try something new. Although it feels like a gimmick, and is, taking the Mexican standoff portion of these films and trying to craft an entire film around them is at least ambitious.

There’s a problem that stems directly from doing this though, and this problem is ultimately this film’s downfall. The reason that Mexican standoffs are generally at the end of the film is because that’s the way they get the audience to care about what will happen. They build tension because we’ve grown to care about one, or often both, of these characters, and we are on our toes about who is going to live. The entire plot of The Quick and the Dead is based around a tournament that has a Mexican standoff every day, with the winner of this competition getting money as a reward.

But this means that we don’t get an entire film to develop the characters, and it means that when characters take to the battlefield, we have no reason to care beyond the “I wonder who is going to win” mentality. The ones that occur near the end of the film don’t suffer from this problem as much, although this movie is lacking in character development, so the problem remains. Another problem also crops up, because by the time we’ve seen people involved in these types of fights multiple times already, we’ve grown tired of them and recognized that they are only a gimmick.

A tournament is what we get, however, and it’s before the competition begins that we meet our main characters. From what I can gather, our main good guy is Ellen (Sharon Stone) who wanders into this town, seemingly only after money. She must be our lead because we see flashbacks of her father being killed. The main bad guy is John Herod (Gene Hackman), who collects 50% of the townspeople’s money, and is therefore the bad guy. But the town runs, so I don’t really see what the big deal is.

There are two other characters who we’re told we should watch. Russell Crowe plays a character who may or may not be a priest, depending on who you talk to, while Leonardo DiCaprio plays “The Kid”, a character who insists that he’s Herod’s son, although Herod claims the opposite. There’s no real conclusion to that story, so you’ll have to make your own judgments on this one, assuming you do decide to watch this.

If you’re guessing right now that these are the four people who will make it to the semi-final round of the tournament, give yourself a cookie. The story is as basic as I’ve described, save for the flashbacks that Ellen continuously has, which only serve to give her a slight bit more motivation for being in the tournament, other than wanting money. But the full flashback isn’t revealed until the end, and left me feeling mixed about if she had a just cause showing up in the first place.

That is about as much emotion as I felt during The Quick and the Dead, and it’s in that flashback where the most emotion is shed by a character too. In this case, a child actor playing a young Ellen ends up turning in the best performance, which felt really odd. Sharon Stone doesn’t show a single hint of emotion throughout the film, answering everything coldly and never speaking unless spoken to first. Our bad guy doesn’t really seem all that evil, the priest doesn’t have any personality, and The Kid is a stereotype. But this child actor actually showed that Ellen can feel things, or maybe why she went into such an isolation in the first place.

But this doesn’t explain why the characters can’t grow as the tournament progresses. Sure, we learn more about them, but they stay the same, meaning that any lessons they should learn aren’t taken in, and they remain just as dull as they were to begin, only we’re now sure that they’re dull. I have a feeling that if I were to ever watch this movie again, it would be worse because I’d have already discovered all I could about these characters, and that knowing how poorly developed they are would lessen my experience and bore me even more than this first viewing did.

It’s not like the Mexican standoffs are even that interesting. The drama usually comes from characters standing there, facing one another, trying to determine when the other will make a move. Here, they have to wait for a clock to strike 12, which reduces a lot of the tension that is already at critically low levels. These types of standoffs only really work with well-developed characters who each have a good enough chance to win, but this film doesn’t have either.

Basing an entire film around what is arguably the most enjoyable part of Western films seemed like a good idea on paper, but fails because it doesn’t take into account what makes Mexican standoffs so fun in the first place. Since it failed to give us proper tension, there is little keeping us watching this film, apart from seeing who will eventually win the tournament. The Quick and the Dead sidesteps some Western cliches, but falls victim to others while showing off poor execution on parts that needed to be pitch-perfect.

Would you like to know who I would be perfectly okay with removing from movies forever? Chris Tucker. I can’t think of a single role where he didn’t annoy me and make me wish his character dead. And it’s not like he’s a great actor either. No, the stand-up comedian, (I don’t actually mind his standup routines), just isn’t ever given good roles, or is possibly only given roles that people believe he can pull off. And since those roles are always ones of annoyance, he infuriates me when he’s on-screen.

I mention this, because Tucker is in The Fifth Element, and is given a role that becomes larger with time — as does the big enemy of the movie, a giant planet of evil. Tucker plays Rudy Rhod, a media personality who has a high-pitched voice and talks over everyone whenever he gets the chance. He’s introduced to us by getting a chance to sing, but eventually becomes the stereotypical sidekick role. But he’s so over-the-top and so incredibly infuriating that I just wanted him to leave the film and never return. Which happens near the end, when he announces his departure and isn’t seen from any more. But it comes too late and by that point, I wanted more conclusion. I wanted him dead.

I think that if a character made me feel this strongly — someone who isn’t even the lead of the picture — then the film has done a good job. I don’t like Tucker as an actor, and I disliked his character even more, but since I wished him gone every minute he was on the screen, then the film has gotten an emotional reaction out of me, and it has succeeded in that aspect. But making an intentionally annoying character has repercussions, as I didn’t like the film as much as I potentially would have had it not been included. It’s a mixed bag in including things like this, but I’ll call it a success here because of how strong an emotional response it got out of me.

It did this, especially in comparison to how neutral I felt regarding the film’s story, which didn’t make me feel much of anything at all. The story follows a couple of different characters, with the primary one being Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), a cab driver who gets a flying car because that’s how it will be in the year 2263. One day, a girl falls through the roof of his cab — more or less unharmed, I might add — but doesn’t speak English. She manages to tell him to take her to a priest named Vito Cornelius (Ian Holm), and that her name is Leeloo (Milla Jovovich).

It’s at the priest’s house that the film’s prologue which depicted events taking place 300 years ago start to make sense. The giant planet headed toward Earth can only be stopped by some mystical being who, together with four stones each representing the four elements (air, water, earth and fire) will destroy it. The title of the film comes from this being, who is supposedly the fifth element needed. Leeloo is this being.

But there are no stones. We learn where they are: They’re being kept by one Diva Plavalaguna (Inva Mula) on a planet that is difficult to get to. This sparks a race from four parties: Korben and the government, Leeloo and the priest, the main bad guy of the film, Zorg (Gary Oldman) and some creatures called the Mondoshawan. Zorg wants the stones to help the evil planet, who is affectionately named Mr. Shadow, while the Mondoshawan want them to sell them to Zorg. There’s essentially only two sides, and when the fate of the universe is at stake, two sides is plenty.

The story left me with indifference, particularly because of how quickly it comes to a conclusion. We see early on, when Leeloo is learning about our culture that she is horrified at the images of war. If humans are such terrible things, why should she help save them anyway? We know that this is what’s going through her mind, partially because it’s obvious how shocked she is, but also because of how well Jovovich has to act with only her body language. But the answer to this question comes and goes like a gust of wind, and then the film has its final scene.

I mentioned that Jovovich has to do a great job of acting here, and I stand by that, For most of the film, she doesn’t get to speak, at least, not in a way that we can understand. Her character doesn’t know how to speak English (although she can apparently understand it). So she has to convey emotions through her facial expressions, body language, and her eyes. And she does it. It works. We care for a character that can’t even use verbal communication, because of how well Jovovich does with this role. That’s not to say the other actors don’t do a good job too, (apart from Tucker), but they don’t have the same degree of difficulty as she does.

Since The Fifth Element is set in the future, and takes place a lot of the time in space, it counts as a science-fiction film. Now, science-fiction films generally go one of two ways, and spend all of their time after production in one of these two directions. They’ll either remain timeless, despite their special effects having aged and not looking quite as good as they once did, or they can look dated very soon after their release.

What determines what way they go is not in the special effects themselves, but more in how the film is presented, how the technology is used, and whether or not we can believe that this world could be possible, or could have been possible at one point. The world created here is one that feels realistic, and the things it dreams up are imaginable. The special effects aren’t even that bad, even if they are showing their age a touch.

However, this film gets worse as it progresses, largely because it has a large-scale action scene near its conclusion that felt really out of place. It’s like finding a chocolate chip in your lemonade. The chocolate chip itself is good, but finding it in your beverage was unwelcome. That’s what the large action scenes in this film felt like. Alone, there’s nothing wrong with them, but when this film wasn’t really about action, but they’re thrown in near the end anyway, they don’t feel like they should be there. That’s really the biggest problem that this film has though, well, that, and the lack of emotion that came from the main story.

There are also some pacing issues that occur throughout. The main story takes a while to get going, and once it does, there are moments that slowed it down and seemed unnecessary. You could probably chop this film down to about 105 minutes, instead of just over two hours like it ended up being, and you’d actually have a better film. (For instance, we could remove all of Tucker’s character, especially the 5 minutes of “singing” that happens when we first meet him.)

Helping to alleviate some of these pacing problems is the script, which isn’t great, but some of the dialogue that comes from it is. I laughed a lot more than I thought I would thanks to this film, both from the dialogue, and from how ridiculous some of the things that happen throughout are. There are a lot of scenes where I found myself laughing, and this was unexpected. This also stops once the action scenes begin though, which is another reason that I disliked them.

The absolute best part of the film comes from how certain scenes, and the transitions from scene to scene, are structured. A character will say something in one scene, and we’ll cut to another character in a completely different area, who will respond or react to what the first character said. While not a revolutionary technique, it’s one that I like to see employed, so I was happy to see it happening here.

I liked The Fifth Element. It’s not amazing, but it’s a fun ride that has colorful characters and some solid acting. The sci-fi setting is interesting and actually a decent enough depiction as to how our society could go, which means that this is a film that will likely stand the test of time. If only I had cared more about what was happening, or if Chris Tucker had been removed from the production, it would have been an absolute pleasure to watch. As it is, a really solid film that could have been better, but still was really enjoyable.