The Highlander (1986) starring Christopher Lambert has an interesting plot with some cool bits throughout the movie, including a strong appearance by Sean Connery. This just about makes up for the cheesy bad acting, which is so bad in places, it’s borderline satirical – not helped by the extremely cheesy music played throughout, by an 80s band called Queen.
Highlander is about a few ‘immortal’ men, who can not die, unless they are decapitated. Lambert’s character, Connor MacLeod (pronounced MacCloud) has lived for a few hundred years until the present day (1986, in New York), and this movie follows him during his first lifetime in the Highlands of Scotland, a few hundred years ago, as well as during his time in ‘present day’ New York. Plus there’s a short clip of him participating WW2.
The basic concept is, those few immortal men must meet and fight each other until there is only one left. MacLeod makes friends with some of them, including Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (played fantastically by Sean Connery) who has lived for thousands of years, and teaches MacLeod about his powers and trains him how to fight; but there is one big and nasty man called The Kurgan (played adequately by Clancy Brown) who beheads all of Lambert’s friends for hundreds of years until finally it’s just the two of them left to decide the winner in present day New York City.
There’s no other strong or important performances to speak of in this movie, as far as I see. The various women in MacLeod’s life were all played satisfactorily by different actresses but none of them stand out to me as being especially noteworthy.
So all in all it’s not a terrible movie. It’s worth watching once in a blue moon when you’ve got nothing better to do. Christopher Lambert is his usual self – he does a generally decent job; and Sean Connery is his usual self – excellent in his role although he has less than half the screen time of Lambert here.
If you enjoyed this movie, don’t miss the many sequels, which continue with the same theme, and offer a similar level of stunts and acting.