You’re kidding, right?

Its 2024, 25 years after the world was saved from utter destruction at the hands of our sun. The Ozone Layer had been totally depleted and humanity was dying until a group of scientists, advised by Connor MacLeod himself, devised an electromagnetic shield that totally prevents the sun’s light and ultraviolet radiation from getting through. The side-effect of this however is that 25 years on the world is dying and is in almost total darkness. We see Connor (Christopher Lambert) but for some reason he’s now an old man, nodding off at an opera, luckily his dreams are a tad more interesting and shed some light on the history of the immortals. A very long time ago, as the film puts it, a group of people in a desert somewhere meet up in the wreckage of some sort of large aircraft. The leader of the meeting is a tall fellow with grey facial hair and a pony tail to match, in fact its Ramírez (Sean Connery) our Scottish Spaniard, who urges the people to rise up and fight against the tyranny of General Katana (Michael Ironside, who we will see shortly) now that they have someone to lead them. He is of course referring to Connor MacLeod, he and Ramírez proving his leadership qualities by both sticking their fingers in an orange liquid, the assembled people look on in wonder at the cheap special effects that result. So this ragtag collection of people led by MacLeod charge into battle against Katana’s forces and are utterly annihilated, some leader Connor was – he stands rooted the spot and watches his men mown down by the opposition’s superior firepower. Wussy. Ramírez and MacLeod stand trial for rebellion against Katana’s rule, the court presided over by three bald guys with cloaks who talk as one voice without moving their lips, handy for dubbing over with alternate dialogue! For their crimes against whatever the hell they’re meant to be, MacLeod and Ramírez are exiled to the future where they will be immortals who can only be killed by decapitation. Once there, they will fight other exiles sent as immortals too until there is only one left who may then decide whether to be a mortal and eventually die in the future, or to come back to the past. Really. Ramírez tells MacLeod that he will always be there for him, and all he has to do is call when he needs help. Huh?

Back in 2024 and a group of people easily slip into the base for the electromagnetic shield generator. This is an underground group who believe that TSC (The Shield Corporation, natch) is keeping information from the people of Earth so that they can make huge profits from the shield’s continued use. They hack the systems and run a check to find that the atmosphere above the shield is actually totally normal, then escape with this vital information in tow. The leader of this group is Louise Marcus (Virginia Madsen) and her next stop is to track down Connor MacLeod and try and get him to do something about the crisis on Earth caused by the shield. He is uninterested (and has an irritatingly overdone croaky voice) but they don’t have much time to argue right now as Katana, sitting in the past and watching MacLeod, grows tired of waiting for him to make his decision now that he is the last immortal (him growing old didn’t give you a hint? Yeesh!) and sends two odd maniacally cackling fellows to the future to kill him. Connor fights one of them and they end up scrapping on a train, which ends up cutting his attacker’s head off. Connor is zapped with the energy of the dead immortal and becomes young again, and has a cheesy flying battle with the other assailant before decapitating him with some electrical wire. While being hit by the Quickening the second time, Connor cries out for his old friend Ramírez and a blast of energy shoots into the air, bounces off the electromagnetic shield, and Ramírez reappears in the middle of a performance of Hamlet in Scotland. The less said about this the better. A shocked Louise Marcus runs to him and can barely believe it’s the same man, though that doesn’t stop them having sex against a wall immediately afterwards, I guess Viagra is outlawed in the future or something. Infuriated by his men’s failure, Katana himself decides to travel into the future to track down and destroy his nemesis while Connor, with the help of Louise and Ramírez must find a way of shutting down the electromagnetic shield and saving the planet from destruction, again.

I’m sad to say that Highlander 2 was a hack job back then, and very little has changed with this so-called director’s cut. Funny thing, I’d come to consider director’s cuts to be when the director’s original vision was compromised in some way such as scenes being cut, reediting, and the like. This isn’t what we have here though, here we have some people attempting to restore some credibility to a film by back-pedalling, changing elements of the film and trying to blame other people for how the original version came out. So the film company had final cut and changed things, fair enough, but did they add the idea of the immortals being exiled aliens from the planet Zeist? Did they introduce a story that pays absolutely no attention to the way the Ramírez and MacLeod characters were introduced in the first film? I think not. But that’s gone now as if that’s made everything better, despite the glaring truth that the plot they replaced it with isn’t any sort of improvement. In fact this ‘new’ explanation for how they ended up where they were is even more stupid, its ‘a very long time ago’ on Earth where they just happen to have machine guns, flying transportation, and the ability to send people through time. Heck, I hated the ‘Planet Zeist’ crap but that made more sense than this, at least that told us who these people are meant to be, in this version they’re just in the distant past and that’s it, no explanation at all for who anybody is or why they’re there or where they all went later. This is meant to be better?

As for the rest of the film which if you are to believe the booklet which came with the DVD saw an extensive re-editing, its still the same cheesy, badly written, poorly acted mess it always was. I cannot watch the scene of Ramírez returning to Earth in the middle of a performance of Hamlet without wincing and feeling very embarrassed for everybody involved, especially Sean Connery himself, it’s a dire attempt at comedy. The film is filled with terrible attempts at one liners for example despite being from Planet Zeist/the distant past, Michael Ironside’s cookie cutter villain makes modern references about being “the number one draft choice” and the like. Worse still is the most memorable line that MacLeod can come up with is when one of is flying assailants says “Say goodbye MacLeod” and he replies “Are you going somewhere?” I feel dirty just typing that one, and the writers should be doomed to a life of compulsively scrubbing themselves for this putrid script. The performances are passable, Lambert does about as well as could be expected given the shoddy writing (lousy), Virginia Madsen plays her part with a minimum of effort which unfortunately is little more than a meaningless love interest for MacLeod anyway. Its sad watching Sean Connery try and grapple with the inept writing yet still get in some of his trademark charm, which he just about manages, though there are moments when his heart just doesn’t look in it at all. Michael Ironside is the only character allowed to have any fun in this picture and despite the appalling dialogue written for him, he’s still the most appealing thing in the as the evil Katana, his charisma is undeniable and he’s the only star who had a snowball’s chance in hell of rising above the material provided.

The visuals of the film have dated terribly since its original release too, its no wonder they ended up going over their budget as the look of the film is extremely over-ambitious and suffers severely for it when it becomes obvious the money ran out, and that it possibly wasn’t terribly plentiful to start with. Sets were built from scratch and though convincing, wouldn’t really have made much difference if they modified some existing buildings instead of flying to Argentina and going to so much trouble, plus they’re not even used very much in some cases. Some of the action looks terrible too, a flying battle between MacLeod and one of the odd fellows sent to kill him looks like a bad knock-off of the flying sequences from 1987’s Masters of the Universe only of far lower quality. There are lapses in continuity too, one of the reinstated scenes for this version is a battle between MacLeod and Katana on top of a moving van, and though the magnetic shield was meant to block all of the sun’s rays, the sunlight is plain to see as they grapple atop the moving vehicle! Its astounding that they actually chose to put this scene back in. The shooting of the film shows a great deficit in originality, the point made by the review of this film over at Jabootu that the numerous shots involving fans bare a strong resemblance to Blade Runner is a good example of the derivative nature of the film. Considering the relatively original and interesting ideas put forth in the first film, why did the makers of this feel the need to base so much of it on sci-fi clichés rather than basing the story within the realm of the first film? In its favour there are a couple of the early action set pieces prove to be quite enjoyable and we get some nice explosions early on before their budget ran out, then there’s the fun to be had from watching Michael Ironside chew scenery, but then again how many films has he made where he doesn’t?

The booklet that came with the DVD tells us we should consider this as a separate entity from the other Highlander films that just features the same ‘exciting characters’ in a totally new adventure, what a cop-out! The majority of fans of the first film will check this out to see a continuation of the original, not a half-assed attempt to try something totally different with a concept they can’t didn’t need to make any alterations to in the first place. A near-complete waste of time, this should have been called Highlander 2: Exercise in Futility Edition.