Review of Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) by Cody C — 10 Sep 2012

To start off, I watched the Director's Cut of Highlander 2: The Quickening. This version is vastly different from the theatrical version that was panned on its release, removing the fact that immortals are aliens from another planet and other shit that was wrong with that cut.

So as I review this, I decided not to take into fact what the critics have said simply cause what they all reviewed was a different version. Not to say the film is WAY different. Highlander 2, no matter what version, will never be a good film.

This version however improves what was considered "atrocious" into a mediocre film, however you look at it. To start off, the film does have some cool action scenes, and I like some of the plot ideas, but I must say that some of the plot also sucks! It can be inconsistent and ridiculous.

The beginning of the film even doesn't do a very good job of leading off from the first, it does a little but could do better. There is shit that is never explained, and we're supposed to accept it in our knowledge of the Highlander world, BULLSHIT! The acting was subpar too, Michael Ironside really went over the top a little while Christopher Lambert is mixed as always, not too bad but not very strong either.

Sean Connery is fairly okay though. I liked some of the art direction too, but that also got spoiled by some cheap looking visual effects. So to sum it all up, I found some entertainment in two forms: enjoying parts for what it was, but mainly enjoying it as a mess of a film as its shear badness made me laugh at times.

It had some potential ideas which really saves the film from being terrible or SURPRISINGLY even that bad , which I believe is thanks to the plot changes made by the Director's Cut, which is a saving grace that greatly improves the film, at least making it watchable and at the worst, quite mediocre.

But bad things aside, as many as there were, I oddly enough enjoyed it in the end, the second half mainly though, first half was much weaker.