At least the worst is over and done with very early on.
Conan the Barbarian, a remake of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger saga), begins on a battlefield, where a pregnant warrior suffers a fatal wound. She demands to see her baby before she dies, and so the father of the child performs an Iron Age C-section in the midst of all other sorts of bloodletting. Conan is born.
If you make it through that, you should be able to survive the rest. Enjoying it will be another matter. If the Schwarzenegger film had epic pretensions, this is the shoddy, slumming grindhouse version – 85 percent head chopping and 15 percent silly sex.
Clumsily edited, poorly staged and anchored by a charisma-free performance from Jason Momoa, Conan the Barbarian has little to offer aside from the occasional oddities. One battle features some pretty cool sand demons who burst out of the dust, while Rose McGowan is on hand as a creepy witch who seems to have gotten a makeover at the Star Wars cantina.
Mostly, though, this bears the grisly mark of director Marcus Nispel (the man behind the recent Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning). He’s given us a Conan for the torture porn age.
