Actor Stephen Lang , award-winning veteran of stage, film, and television, earned his biggest success to date playing the hardened Colonel Miles Quaritch in James Cameron’s Avatar . But in the wake of Avatar , the character actor was looking for a departure of sorts, and he found it in the mythic fantasy landscape conceived by Robert E. Howard playing a bloodthirsty warlord in Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian .
Movies have become so technically sophisticated, so hyper-real, that there’s almost no such thing as a cheap pulp entertainment anymore: So many movies set out to wow us, which isn’t the same as giving us pleasure. Yet even within those dispiriting parameters, you couldn’t come up with a more mediocre wow than Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian , which is perhaps less a remake of John Milius’ 1982 crowdpleaser than an attempt to honor the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s original novels, though it’s hard to tell exactly what effect Nispel is going for. I wanted to giggle when Ron Perlman, as Conan’s dad-to-be, performed an emergency mid-battle C-section on his dying wife. But the Conan birth scene, so epic in its epicness, is played totally straight. When Perlman holds that tastefully blood-streaked CGI newborn aloft to the mighty heavens, he seems to be angling for a few gifts of frankincense or myrrh, or at least a gift certificate from Land of Nod.
Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian is shaping up to be the crazypants fantasy actioner of the summer; the only movie with character design strange enough to rival it is Tarsem ‘s Immortals , and that doesn’t hit until November. So dive into Movieline’s gallery of newly released Conan stills — filled with bare chested brawny men, Klingon-like warriors, and razor-fingered Rose McGowan as the tattooed, half-bald witch of your darkest, sexiest nightmares — to see what you’re in for come Aug. 19.
