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Aug 17, 201170Squeamish types may balk, but the gory cruelty on display here is faithful to the source material and deeply thrilling.
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63It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.
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60Brutal, bloody beyond belief, and has no socially redeeming value. So it is with a certain amount of guilt that I say it's kind of a wicked blast to watch, especially if you're in the mood for some righteous revenge.
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60The film's secret weapon proves to be Freddy Krueger–fingernailed witch Marique, whom Rose McGowan plays with the kind of fuck-it-all brio - imagine a cross between Madeline Kahn in "History of the World: Part I" and Lady Gaga - that should garner her a Razzie and an Oscar.
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50Conan the Barbarian has its small, insipid pleasures, if you're in the mood.
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50Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling. Thankfully, he also shows glints of self-awareness that can make hypermasculine blowouts like these more watchable and were largely missing from Mr. Schwarzenegger's wide-eyed turn in the first "Conan the Barbarian" (1982).
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Aug 18, 201150Rife with the oldest and simplest pleasures of 3-D movies: all sorts of objects fly at the camera, and the climactic battle takes place over a deep, dark chasm. At its best the movie suggests a funhouse at a state-of-the-art county fair; at its worst it's a fairly dumb celebration of brute violence.
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50It's mostly noise and splurch and, as I mentioned, aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!
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50There's something and nothing for everyone in Conan the Barbarian 3D.
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50Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.
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Aug 16, 201150The well-executed picture solves the biggest challenge facing those hoping to breathe new life -- however nasty, brutish and short -- into the 79-year-old franchise by finding an actor capable of filling Ah-nuld's shoes.
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45The movie's look is artificially grainy, and most of the scenes are encrusted with CGI - you'd have to chip it away with a chisel to get to anything human or interesting or even remotely fantastical.
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40A gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.
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Aug 17, 201140The bigger problem is that the action literally bleeds together and there's no sense of pacing.
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38The 2011 version of Conan the Barbarian looks cheap and feels rushed. The few good elements are dwarfed by a generic, nonsensical plot and shoddy storytelling.
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38In today's cultural climate, any remake of Conan the Barbarian can only be considered (a) redundant or (b) a cruel case of rubbing salt in our cinematic wounds. Either way, it ain't a pretty sight – in fact, it's downright barbaric.
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Aug 18, 201138Those nostrils do a lot of Momoa's acting, to be honest. As right as he is looks-wise, Momoa falls short in attitude.
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38Conan the Barbarian lives by a pretty simple ethos: He lives, he loves, he slays. What he doesn't do, alas, is act.
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38As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.
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38A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.
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30The result is a somewhat functional blood feast for the exploitation crowd, but it's hardly a bead of sweat on the original's battered backside. Oh, and the score? Basil Poledouris' bombastic brass is still No. 1.
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30There's just not a lot to like here, with the exception of what may be one of the all-time best bad movie lines, one Conan utters to Tamara as a kind of personal credo: "I live. I love. I slay. I am content."
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30There is no purpose to the film other than random blood splattering amid scenes of bondage, primitive savagery and S&M eroticism. The film is numbing and dumb with its hero indistinguishable from its villains.
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25Morgan Freeman's voice is heard as the narrator, which is in itself the stuff of parody. Then we listen and get lost within two sentences, because the narration is so poorly written that Freeman himself probably didn't know what he was talking about.
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25Momoa, a familiar face from "Game of Thrones" to "Baywatch," has the muscles but not the imposing persona and barbaric presence that Conan requires.
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25It shouldn't, in other words, be that hard to make a good Conan movie. John Milius did a half-decent job with "Conan The Barbarian" in 1982, but this new film of the same name feels like a half-hearted revamp of virtually any of the Conan rip-offs that clogged up video-store shelves in the '80s.
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Aug 17, 201125The re-whatevered Conan the Barbarian feels unexpectedly low-rent, even with its multi-million-dollar backdrops and ear-splitting, rumbling soundtrack and (presumably post-converted) 3D imagery.
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20With the most growling and grunting of any movie this summer - and that includes those apes perched atop the box office - Conan the Barbarian seems at times to have actually been made by barbarians.
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20There are swords and sorcery, pirates and monsters, taxed bodices and taxing mythology. In other words, there's the bare minimum necessary to summon this dismal movie into existence.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 29 out of 54
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Mixed: 8 out of 54
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Negative: 17 out of 54
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