Highlander: Endgame
It's almost as fun as poking your eyeballs out with a rusty spoon!

Mmmm, short-haired Adrian Paul. Oh, and Christopher Lambert's there, too.

The Highlander franchise started off pretty well. The first movie was kick-ass, spawning a cult following before losing a great deal of it with Highlander II: The Quickening, in which the previous interesting storyline was thrown out in favor of an "immortals are space aliens" theory. From there, it couldn't get much worse, and indeed it got better: the third film, Highlander: The Final Dimension, was lame but not overwhelmingly sucky, and the television series pulled the franchise up by its bootstraps into a new age of prosperity.

Of course, prosperity tends not to last, especially when dealing with an idea that's already been dragged straight to Hell and back and really just needs to be shot. Enter Highlander: Endgame, the fourth in the series of films which finally weds the largely bad series of films with the mostly good television series, teaming leads Christopher Lambert and Adrian Paul against villain Bruce Payne.

Basic details and history lesson aside, I'd like to cut quickly to the chase here. It's something that I didn't think I'd ever say, but in this case, I have to be honest. Endgame is an even worse movie than Highlander II. Yes, I know... it's hard to believe that any film could be worse. But Highlander II, at least, veered so totally from the original premise that you could laugh your ass off at it or, like most of us -- the filmmakers included -- pretend it never happened. Endgame makes that more difficult, in that it sticks closely enough to the original idea that it merely confuses, frightens, and just may make you ill.

Nothing like this was actually in the film, but it does prove that things could have been worse, I suppose.

The film's ever-changing title was the first clue of its impending suckdom. At various times in its conception, it was Highlander: The Search for Connor, Highlander: A New Order, and Highlander: A World Without End. The film itself seems to have undergone the same identity crisis, but I have a theory about the origins of the script that may explain it all. Not wanting to pay a writer with any sort of talent, the producers obviously just took the worst of the rejected scripts for Highlander: The Series, unbound them, threw them up in the air, and then walked around picking up random pages. This explains nearly everything about the movie: the incredibly pathetic, moronic dialogue, the non-existent plot, and the sheer crappiness of it all. The film is nothing more than a scene of disjointed, generally unrelated scenes thrown together in something that a very drunken editor must've considered order. The camera work is shaky at best and headache-inducing at worst, and director Douglas Aarniokoski manages to make Jan De Bont look like a visionary in the field.

If you feel traumatized by this film, just stare at this picture for awhile and you should feel better.

The performances are flat and lifeless, as if the actors were as bored with the whole thing as audiences will doubtlessly be, and the exception is bad-guy Bruce Payne, who manages to overact tremendously in every scene he's in. Peter Wingfield and Jim Byrnes, regulars on the series, are completely wasted with tiny, extremely pointless scenes, and the supporting cast seems to be full of people whose sole purpose is to look pretty -- Lisa Barbuscia foremost among them -- who manage to fail at even that much.

There are not enough synonyms for "bad" in the English language, so I don't feel that I can appropriately convey just how horrible Endgame is. I'm a Highlander fan from way back, and I had a strong urge to walk out quite a few times during the movie, but there's enough terrible dialogue and completely confounding "plot" to make for an excellent MST3K session, especially since viewers of this one will probably be seeing the film in an empty theater. If you're not a Highlander fan, you still won't be after seeing this movie, and in fact will probably develop a compulsion to scrub your eyeballs with bleach whenever somebody says the word "Highlander" to you -- and even after doing so, you'll still feel dirty. If you are a Highlander fan... well, you might not want to admit it in public anymore now that this movie's out in the world.

For the love of God, somebody put this franchise out of its misery. Unless, of course, the next addition would be Methos: The Series.

DROOL FACTOR: I want to take Peter Wingfield home with me and spare him the horror of ever doing any more movies like this. And Adrian Paul looks sexy with that short hair.

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: The whole movie qualifies. The fact that it exists is pretty damn disgusting.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: There's only a single chick in the entire film who's around for more than a minute, and you'll quickly wish that she weren't.

-- Lisa Kincaid

Highlander: Endgame is unfortunately currently playing nationwide in the US.

We welcome your comments on The 11th Hour and this review. Please send letters to: letters@the11thhour.com