Conan the Destroyer (1984), the sequel to 1982’s surprise success Conan the Barbarian, is a lot sillier than its predecessor. It’s also a lot slighter. I like a description I saw of it the other day (but whose origin I can’t remember) that the movie has the energy of an Italian knockoff movie that happens to neither be Italian nor a knockoff. It’s not very good, and I can’t say I liked it that much, either; it’s about what you would expect from a swords-and-sandals action movie doomed from the jump to likely not be able to top the movie coming before it.
Destroyer picks up presumably not long after Barbarian. It finds the title character, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger with Fabio hair extensions and without a shirt, poached by a queen, Taramis of Shadizar (Sarah Douglas), to help escort her niece, Jehnna (Olivia d’Abo), to “restore” a magical, bejeweled horn in a faraway land.
What we can be certain of is that getting to that point will constitute a quest, the sort of thing that will require one stop by a hall of mirrors where a snarling man-beast lurks and another in some dangerous waters. We also can be certain that it wouldn’t be very wise, the way Conan does, to trust Taramis’ motives. Her sartorial choices betray power-hungriness, and she’s portrayed with such delicious smarminess by Douglas that we can’t look at her as anything besides an evil older family member type whose supposed care for their younger, kinder, and more classically beautiful relative is motivated not by actual care but the preservation of one’s self-interest.
Douglas is my favorite thing about a movie — she seems to be having the time of her life, and her open relishment in playing the bad guy is infectious — that otherwise feels a bit enervated. It’s the kind of enervation you notice from sequels that have been rushed into production for the sake of capitalizing on a product without much additional thought put into them besides “we have to get this out.”
It’s a shame Douglas isn’t in the movie enough to consistently give it the frissons of energy she does when she does appear, and also that the one-of-a-kind Grace Jones, who appears as a wild bandit warrior woman who joins what amounts to a Conan-led caravan to get to the horn, doesn’t have much to do besides snarl. In her movie career, Jones repeatedly proved that her ferocious singularity could only really be effectively harnessed when she was calling the shots. Save for 1992’s Boomerang, which let her let loose in a very funny comic turn, she wouldn’t quite ever get a role worthy of her. Schwarzenegger, however, obviously would, and watching him do not much more than show off his brawn feels like the equivalent of putting his time in before things could really get good.
Peterson Reviews 