Author: J. A.

Last time: Connor had a mountain of artifacts and the occasional happy flashback.

14. Let me explain…

So it’s time for Ramirez. And it won’t be a big surprise that I don’t especially like the character, but it always gets me that I feel so darned guilty about it. He brings verve to parts of the movie that could use it, which is good. He’s an exposition character, which is something I usually love. And the casting that causes a character who is an Egyptian-born Spaniard to have the strongest Scots burr in the movie is the kind of inspired (or possibly “inspired”) move that usually wins me right over.

And so I try to break it down, only to be thwarted at every turn by things I do like. Is it the cheese factor?

Guess not. The bombast?

Nope.

Anyway, Ramirez (Sean Connery, which is the one fact about Highlander even people who’ve never heard “Princes of the Universe” know) rides into Connor’s life on a white horse.

At this point, I was going to make an Old Spice joke… and that’s when it hit me. Ramirez is supposed to be a Mr. Miyagi figure, but with the velvet suit and the booming voice, he reads like Lord Flashheart from Blackadder, right from the beginning.

Ramirez introduces himself as “Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, chief metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain,” working his red velvet suit and peacock cape for all they’re worth. Connor’s wife sums it up succinctly: “Who?” I generally spend this part of the movie wondering whether Connor and Heather know anything about Spain. (Presumably blacksmith Connor knows some metallurgy, but I’d bet you a zillion skull helmets he wouldn’t call it that.)

Ramirez proves that he knows Connor’s backstory, and then—somehow—gives Connor a Quickening.

This is something I’ve been trying to figure out. A friend of mine has a theory that an immortal can trigger a Quickening at will if they have one “on deck,” so to speak, but this means what? Ramirez saved up the results of his last duel for what is basically a sales presentation? Is it like those PSAs from my childhood where the drug dealer gives you the first one free?

As the lightning subsides and the rain falls, Ramirez looks up to the sky and shouts, “We are brothers!” It looks like he’s going to embrace the Highlander, but the scene cuts before he does. I wouldn’t press that guy against a nice suit either.

Meanwhile, in the ’80s, Brenda bribes Moran with lunch and snoops through his desk; in his treasure cave, Connor sharpens his sword in front of a fish tank I bet he doesn’t maintain properly and looks at Brenda’s picture on the back of a book about sword-making.

Next time: For Found-Again Friday, I assuage my guilt about Ramirez by taking on a Connery movie I loved…when I was nine.

Next time on TCBOM!: It’s like Rocky, but with kilts and topography.

Last time: the pseudo-martyrdom (and painful repeated head-butting) of Connor MacLeod.

Back in the ’80s, Connor lopes down the street as dawn puts an end to what I think we can all agree was a long damn day for him. He’s going home at last.

And like every other supernatural humanoid in fiction, he is clearly enormously wealthy: we see him descend an elegant staircase on his way to a sitting room that is basically a treasure vault filled with antiques (to the mere mortals in the story)/relics of past stages of his existence (to those of us in the knowing audience).

It’s at this point that I usually start complaining about the rich-immortal phenomenon in general, so I’ll say it here too: won’t somebody, sometime, write a story about a vampire who’s just really bad at investments?

Connor sits down, stares off into the distance, and summons another 16th-century flashback, in which he’s a mere blacksmith with a pretty wife named Heather…and an enormous tower to live in. Setting aside that sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, how did a smith and a…farmer?…manage that? Is Heather the last bit of some sort of Tess of the D’Urbervilles fallen-family situation? Are they squatters?

Whatever they are, they’ve just finished a spot of al-fresco sex when a horse leaps over them. You know what that means.

Next time: I actually haven’t the foggiest.

Next time on TCBOM!: Anybody heard of this Connery guy?

Bonus goofery: Rewatching for TCBOM! (I try not to watch the whole movie every week, but I like seeing swords clash as much as the next person, and indeed a little more so—occasionally it gets away from me) has meant that I sometimes have Highlander playing while I also have headphones on. This has led to some interesting action/music combinations over time, so much so that I regret I have the mashup-making skills of a dead worm. Instead, we’ll make do with music videos.

• Coolest: Kurgan’s entry into present day + “Stand For the Fire Demon” by Roky Erickson (honorable mention: “Bungle In The Jungle” by Jethro Tull).

•  Most disturbing: Kurgan and Ramirez duel + otherwise excellent jazz song “Set In Motion” by Steven Emerson, which is both completely out of place and just thematic enough about winning at life to be completely unnerving.

• Most surprisingly on, er, point: Connor and Fasil duel + “In For The Kill” by La Roux.

Last time: My scorecard for the scene we talked about in part 11:

• Atmosphere/Creepy appearance of villain: +4
• Girl actually assists in fight instead of just screaming: +2
• Pointfulness of fight, hero or villain side: -4 (-2 apiece)
• Random helicopter: -2
• I want the Kurgan’s evil laugh as a text-message notifier noise: +1
• Total: 1

That’ll do, Highlander. That’ll do.

12. Maybe I’m an optimist at heart after all.

We go to another sixteenth-century flashback, in which the other MacLeods gossip about Connor—and if I’d only started this series earlier, I could be making a nice Christmas-dinner analogy right about now.

The gist of this particular gossip is Connor’s untimely aliveness (to borrow a phrase from The Tick), and how it’s probably all the work of the devil. This part of the movie always throws me into a mild philosophical confusion: I think of myself as a mildly to moderately superstitious person, and also a bit of a pessimist. Yet I think my response to a relative’s revival would be something like this:

In the event the MacLeods lost the battle: “Well, he seems the same. It’s a little weird, but at least that guy with the helmet didn’t kill everybody. Praise god!”

In the event the MacLeods won the battle: “God shows his favor on us again! We thought we’d lost Connor, but he’s alive through a miracle! Praise god!”

Last resort? Pull a Dracula and splash him with holy water to see what happens, since the clan’s priest has been prominent in every flashback sequence. These people have to be getting their demon lore from somewhere, right? Instead, the priest is just as spooked as everybody else.

I’m willing to believe, after shivering in Inverness in July back in my college days, that people in the highlands of Scotland are probably even more pessimistic/colder than I am. I’m just not used to feeling like Pollyanna.

Connor shows up with no apparent idea about any of this (and he’s smiling! make a note!), which is odd: the other MacLeods, especially Dugal*, do not seem to be masters of hiding their feelings. They certainly don’t hide them in the dialogue that follows, which ends with Connor being conked on the head with a jug.

And you know, I want all this not to be a plot contrivance. I try to imagine what it would be like to be, say, Connor’s girlfriend (wife? betrothed? do we know what that relationship is?): there was a huge wound in him, he was grey, not breathing, and now none of those things are true and it’s creepy. So maybe you would want to burn him as a warlock. But no matter how many times I start out saying “It was a more ignorant time,” I always end up at “The MacLeods have lost their damn minds.**”

Connor is tied to a yoke and taken outside, where the idiots of his village—you guessed it—beat the ever-loving shit out of the Highlander. (They also scatter a few chickens.) The intent is still to burn him, but his cousin Angus, voice of reason and approximate Robin Williamson lookalike, pleads him down to exile—not, however, before he’s punched by Dugal and attacked by Random Headbutt Guy.

I find Random Headbutt Guy fascinating because until now, we’ve never seen him. I can’t find him in the battle scenes, even though he’s clearly a lover of violence. He doesn’t wear a clan tartan. I’m half convinced he just saw an angry mob and joined in because head-butting people is his most cherished hobby.

If you want to see him yourself, he appears from 2:27 to 2:30 in this montage. Head-butting is a lot more common in movies than I thought.

Bloodied and still yoked, Connor leaves his village forever and leans against a rock, the movie cutting back to the present day by having his face fade into a mural on the side of a building. It’s of Mona Lisa with bloodshot eyes, and I am kind of offended on her behalf.

*This is how the character’s name is spelled according to IMDb. This annoys me disproportionately. Did the O freeze off?

** Especially if, as we see in a later flashback, he’s a blacksmith. Enjoy trying to shoe your horses using only collective anger!

Next time: Found-Again Friday goes animated again.

Next time on TCBOM! Doesn’t everybody have a room for treasure and flashbacks?

Last time: Brenda is a woman on a mission: Connor is a creeper who dilutes his single-malt.

11. A helicopter?

Brenda leaves the bar, and Connor tries to follow her—but she is hiding and trying to follow him instead. This part does fulfill my definition of “meet-cute,” in a detective sort of way—both of them stalking around each other, thinking, “What do you know about that sword?!”

Connor’s immortal-sense appears to go off, so he grabs Brenda and tries to get her to go away. Too late, though—the Kurgan pops up next to them like the world’s evilest, happiest jack-in-the-box. This is a good time to reiterate that it’s nice to see someone actually enjoying himself in this movie, given that Connor has variously scowled and glowered through professional wrestling, a duel, an arrest and interrogation, quality booze, a semi-flirtation, and some small portion of 1536.

They fight (Connor doesn’t have his sword on him…at night…during the Gathering; maybe Brenda should have walked him home instead), with Connor using first a firehose, then a metal pipe handed to him by Brenda. Have I mentioned all the cheap Freud in here lately? In this scene, it’s even cheaper than usual.

A chase ensues, with the Kurgan literally pursuing Connor down a dark alley; it’s very effective. Connor attacks with the pipe again, but it’s wrested away from him, and the Kurgan adds “beat” to his list of options for “[verb] the ever-loving shit out of the Highlander.” He also demonstrates that he has learned nothing constructive about not gloating/roaring out movie taglines at crucial moments. The Kurgan steps toward Brenda, which is a profoundly stupid order of operations when being the ruler of the world is on the line, and Connor tackles him.

…And then a police helicopter appears, for some reason, and the Kurgan utterly fails to take advantage of the surprise and make this one of the shortest action movies on record. Instead, he runs away, leaving Connor with a pipe and Brenda with a bunch of questions—none of which Connor will answer even though she helped save his uncooperative, trenchcoated skin.

Next time: Found-Again Friday.

Next time on TCBOM!: More violence, plus: does that guy even go here?