Last time: Connor replaced charm with stabbing and got the girl anyway.
33. There’s only one thing I want to know.
We’re now at the part of the movie where the villain, in classic form, leverages the hero. Or to put it another way, we are now at the part of the movie from which the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies have drained all my goodwill, because I just can’t take another love interest getting captured and tied to a building, not even for the damn Kurgan. (This is, of course, a classic movie problem: I remember finally watching Halloween sometime in the ’90s and realizing it felt cliché because it had set the standard for every slasher film that followed. The difference, I suppose, is that I’m far too squeamish to watch a slasher on the big screen but somehow found myself at every Spider-Man installment.)
The first thing I despise about this is that, presumably due to time constraints, Brenda turns into your standard-issue damsel in distress when the Kurgan comes after her: she screams; she fails to do any damage to him at all, even with that gun she had ready on her abortive date with Connor and an apartment literally bristling with swords; and when he puts her in the car and goes crazy, driving all over the place, she eventually faints.
I assume the crazy-driving portion of our program is to further show that the villain is losing his grip, both ascending (he finally kills people, if I had to guess) and descending (you have a shot at ruling the world and are running down pedestrians for fun? Really?) in villainy. I suspect one of the things I dislike about this scene—and the end of the movie in general— is the way it implies that Connor couldn’t defeat the Kurgan if the latter was still operating at 16th-century levels of sanity. It cheapens everybody, and it seems to go on forever.
And so I sit and watch this and keep wondering…
Where is that police helicopter?
You know, the one from way back that had so much time to burn that it was cruising around breaking up one-on-one fights in alleys? A guy going around running people over on the sidewalk seems like a great time to use it, but I guess the NYPD finally bought a camera that week instead of chopper fuel. In fact, we won’t be seeing the cops again for the rest of the movie, even though they were watching both Connor and Brenda and, one assumes, looking for the Kurgan.
I’m also going to commit a bit of heresy here, both against the movie and against my pledge to take it as it comes: I prefer the version of this scene that happens in the third Highlander movie. Yes, the one with Mario van Peebles as the barbarian. The terror-by-transportation thing is so much better when the villain has illusion powers.
At any rate, Brenda is absconded with. It’s on.
Next time: Ewwwwwww.
Next time on TCBOM!: The final fight begins, but not before I natter on about minutiae.
