It’s been a reboot in the making since 2008 with Highlander taking the step to its long and eternal journey through development hell. With this, fans of the fantasy sword franchise fave are reveling in the news affirming Lionsgate’s commitment to the upcoming film as this week’s AFM events approach, according to Deadline‘s Andreas Wiseman.
The film joins Man Of Steel and “The Witcher” series star Henry Cavill following his addition to the project in 2021, with none other than stunt multihyphenate and proven John Wick saga director Chad Stahelski, who some fans might even say has risen the bar when it comes to action direction, having led the charge with four movies totaling just under nine hours, all chronicling one former assassin’s quest for vengeance and redemption in a world – all its own – of organized crime.
The four-part action saga, packed with enough breakneck fight choreography, gun-fu, a near-bottomless bodycount, and genre starpower so much that it warranted an exclusive spin-off prequel miniseries at streamer Peacock and another adjacent feature from Len Wiseman with Ana de Armas starring, delivers to fans a tightly-woven, expansive world in which the conditions are explained and the groundrules are laid akimbo with every bit of depth the franchise explores. It might lean somewhat on tedious and overkill at times given the amount of action proffered from the team charged with making Keanu Reeves look as good as he does, but the promise demonstrated with this franchise thusfar lends plenty of reason to grant Stahelski the grace and opportunity to broaden his horizons on other properties for a change.
Highlander, for what it’s worth, couldn’t be a more opportune moment for Stahelski, who had been attached publicly to the project eight years after Summit Entertainment nabbed the rights, with the movie circling several directors and writers in the years since. The film also joined Stahelski with a group of producers that included Peter S. Davis – producer on the 1986 original from Aussie director Russell Mulcahy – who was working on the reboot until his passing in 2021.
As Wiseman notes, Stahelski is directing from a current draft by Mike Finch, with a story and style of action that, as previous headlines have summed-up with interview quotes from the director, packages a film akin to “John Wick, but with swords”. That kind of sexy-talk draws discernible promise given the success of the John Wick franchise with its increasing runtimes leading up to the fourth installment earlier this year. At 169 minutes, the film buffers dithering perceptions of long movie durations, most notably in an era when that theory has been tested with prevailing effect with last year’s The Batman, which runs just a little closer to three hours.
Whether or not Highlander will run that long for its first try in the cinemas is up to the Clan Stahelski. For that matter though, I wouldn’t mind seeing Stahelski spread his wings on this film for as long as it took for one sitting from start to finish, considerably with Stahelski’s ability to keep an audience gripped to the screen, given all that can be genuinely accomplished under his stewardship.
Mulcahy’s inaugural film starred Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Roxanne Hart and Clancy Brown in the story of Connor MacLeod, a present-day antique dealer whose epic, centuries-old and immortal life is explored in a medley of concurrent events and flashbacks, all culminating into an explosive battle in New York City with Kurgan, a brutal warlord who has wanted his head since the sixteenth century. The film also explores MacLeod’s latest toil at love and romance when he meets Brenda, a forensic expert and metallurgy specialist who becomes fixated on the latest findings spurred from recent beheadings in New York City. When her obsession draws her into MacLeod’s world, it also endangers her, forcing him out of hiding to confront the Kurgan one last time, mano-e-mano, for – and as the saying goes – “…There can be only one!”
That tagline has been one of the best selling points for fans of this franchise and for anyone who enjoys a simplistic, enthralling actioner with a plot that boils down to two pugilists brimming with gumption and the will to duke it out until one bests the other. More importantly though, it’s a key code of conduct in the world of immortals explored in this debut chapter from screenwriters Gregory Widen, Peter Bellwood, and Larry Ferguson, in addition to the exclusivity of immortal one-on-one duels with no outside interferences unless conditions require this particular rule be bent, or broken.
It will be interesting to see how Stahelski and Finch tackle designing the world of immortals around this matter of framework. In conjunction, Stahelski’s vision for the action is going to be one of the film’s biggest challenges, particularly with Doug Aarniokoski’s Highlander: Endgame visibly spreading its wings a little more with a touch of Donnie Yen’s Hong Kong-style flair to suit a market that had long-welcomed the cinematic showcases of Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li into the mainstream, topping the more Western-oriented medieval-style action spectacle etched into the first three films. I’m not too worried here about this issue though, seeing as Stahelski and his cohorts at 87eleven are provenly capable of envisioning cinematic action for all kinds of film and TV endeavors.
This does lead to one other item I would love to see enhanced a bit more tautly in the reboot: the “Quickening,” described as a sensation that immortals feel in the millieu of energies with other living things, including the intense power they absorb when they decapitate another immortal at the climax of a duel. I feel like this aspect of Highlander lore gets lost in the procession of things – never really conveyed and solidified the kind of brevity and poise needed in order for it to avoid sounding merely suggestive or throwaway at certain plot points of each film. The same goes for the magical “bond” employed by the aforementioned Connery’s Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez, in Mulcahy’s Highlander: The Quickening, denoting the whimsical inclusion of a historical planet of origin for the immortals known as Zeist (I honestly don’t remember if this was ever mentioned again in the The Final Dimension as it’s been a while since that film landed in my peripherals).
As far as the role the “Quickening” plays in this franchise, one comparison worth pointing out is the issue of “Hadou,” a story element explored in Joey Ansah’s hard-as-nails live-action adaptation, Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist. The way that Akira Koieyama’s Sensei Gouken explains how the transference of “ki” and its procession into “Hadou” to master the Assassin’s Fist style through a pure and untained method, commands an air of perspecuity and thought that Highlander doesn’t venture to attempt. George Lucas also succeeds in this area with the role the “Force” plays in the Star Wars saga, and how both Jedi and Sith put its uses to practice. Juxtaposing these examples for further exegesis, you can hold both of these under same microscope and discern Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat, and to a lesser effect, its compact employment of “Arcana” to delineate the superhuman abilities gained akin to the characters in the video game franchise on which its based.
The franchise has also grown immensely with a number of characters to its roster. Consequently, the result has ensued a series of films that pan out with fractured, disjunct story arcs with little-to-no continuity or cohesion between the movies, leaving little reason to care about what happens to these characters and why. 2007’s Highlander: The Source, the fourth and final live-action film in this smorgasbord saga of MacLeod stories and side quests is one of the most jarring through and through, whatever plusses and positives there were be damned, having done little for fans to bring the saga to a proper close, and ultimately granting all the more reason for someone to pick up where this franchise left off, dust it off, and give it a fresh start before letting the studios shrug it off into obscurity.
One other challenge Stahelski’s Highlander is going to have is drawing in fans with the right soundtrack. Mulcahy’s film comes backed with the energizing vocals and empowering instrumentation of Queen, signifying every chaotic sequence and romantic interlude outlining MacLeod’s sprawling and layered tale of chasing love and a family while surviving anything short of a beheading. Paired with Michael Kamen’s score, any recording artist out here tasked with taking the music of Stahelski’s Highlander to never before-observed levels of entertainment will surely have their hands full, especially when listening to Freddie Mercury croon the shit out of tracks like “Who Wants To Live Forever” and “Princes Of The Universe,” and basically being told to “top it”.
Alas, while Highlander remains a revered cult classic, like most films there is room for improvement. Between four sequels, each a box office failure with critical bullet points worth taking into consideration amid film discourse, and apart from its oblique sucesses in multimedia ventures like comics, animation, TV and video games, that Highlander is still drawn back to relevancy by a film market that continues to circle IPs to bring to the table for hopeful investors is peculiar, to say the least. Still, not dubious at all to point out the potential that a reboot of Highlander can reach. With Stahelski on board pending future updates on the fifth installment of the John Wick saga as of its May announcement, the forthcoming Highlander reboot may just be the movie that helps its parent franchise truly stand the test of time.
And now, a word from the man with the voice.
Enjoy Highlander on Peacock as of this article, as well as the sequels wherever else movies are sold or streamed.