There can be only one Highlander – at least until the reboot comes out

Last month Henry Cavill was beamed into CinemaCon, the annual gathering of US movie theatre owners in Las Vegas, to drum up excitement for his next Hollywood project. The strapping star of Man of Steel and Netflix’s The Witcheris midway through filming a reimagining of Highlander, the cult 1986 fantasy about duelling immortals. 

Cavill’s heftily budgeted reboot will launch next year but this week there is an opportunity to return to the source. To mark its 40th anniversary, the original Highlander is back in UK cinemas. It’s a rare chance to experience the film’s over-the-top stylistic flourishes on the big screen rather than on a well-worn VHS copy, which is how this notorious semi-flop nurtured its enduring fandom.

But for a lurid action movie about guys trying to decapitate each other with antique blades there has always been something strangely endearing about Highlander.

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The wider mythology, dreamt up by writer Gregory Widen when he was still a film student, is mysterious to the point of vagueness. Immortals have secretly walked among us for centuries, an apparently random scattering of warriors from different eras and continents who cannot die unless they have their heads lopped off. These chosen few are drawn together by an unseen force to battle each other down the ages; the last one standing will claim the ultimate prize (even if no one seems to know exactly what that will be).

The eccentricity of the plot is matched by a similar slipperiness in the casting. The opening act sees a 16th-century Scottish clansman being mentored in the ways of immortality by a 2,500-year-old Egyptian in a big flouncy hat.

That the character of Connor MacLeod is played by French actor Christopher Lambert and the dandyish Ramirez is Sean Connery – the cinematic embodiment of Scottishness – feels like a deliberate joke. It’s certainly fun to watch Connery teaching a guy called Connor how to be more Connery.

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It is also a rare 1980s action film that feels genuinely romantic, even melodramatic. The forever young Connor has to witness his first sweetheart Heather (Beatie Edney) age and eventually pass away peacefully in his arms in a genuinely tender sequence.

After that, MacLeod apparently swears off love for over four centuries until he meets no-nonsense New York forensics expert Brenda (Roxanne Hart), who in a bar scene is shown to have a penchant for vintage Scotch. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise she falls for an intoxicating 467-year-old from Glenfinnan.

The things that help bind all these disparate elements into something cohesive and genuinely compelling are the bombastic soundtrack by Queen and the similarly energised direction of Australian director Russell Mulcahy.

A veteran of Duran Duran music videos, Mulcahy does not seem fazed by managing a time-jumping narrative that toggles between MacLeod finding his feet in the 16th century and preparing for a climactic battle against his imposing barbarian nemesis the Kurgan (Clancy Brown) in scuzzy 1980s New York. Instead, Mulcahy clearly relishes coming up with innovative ways to cut between time periods. We are introduced to a vignette of Connor in France during the Second World War by the sound of an incoming howitzer and the screen image shattering like broken glass. Boom!

The reboot is directed by ex-stuntman Chad Stahelski, whose decade-long run of four increasingly ostentatious John Wick movies kept raising the bar for visceral cinematic action. But whatever artfully choreographed combat scenes Stahelski has devised for the update it seems improbable that he’ll equal Mulcahy for style-forward vibes and idiosyncratic editing.  

There is at least one reason to be optimistic. Russell Crowe is playing Ramirez to Cavill’s MacLeod, and the Gladiator star has been making supremely entertaining acting and accent choices in recent B-movies
like Kraven the Hunter. If Crowe can bring a similar impish energy to the new Highlander, it will be entirely in keeping with the charming oddness of the original. 

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