“Conan the Barbarian” involves a clash of civilizations whose vocabularies are limited to screams, oaths, grunts, howls, ejaculations, exclamations, vulgarities, screeches, wails, bellows, yelps and woofs. I’d love to get my hands on the paycheck for subtitling this movie.
The plot involves — oh, never mind. You have your Barbarians, and they kill one another in an unending series of battle scenes. I guess Conan is the good guy, but what difference does it make? He has no cause or belief. He’s driven by revenge against the sadistic Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), who trapped Conan’s father under a vat of molten iron, assigned young Conan to exert his little muscles to try to keep it from tipping, and screamed at the old man: “You will watch your child die trying to save you!”
Luckily, Conan (the muscular Jason Momoa) survives and grows up with no worse than a photogenic scar on his face, where some wayward molten iron dripped. He and his father Corin (Ron Perlman) had earlier forged his sword at the steel moltery; earlier still, the infant Conan was delivered on a battlefield by an emergency Caesarian performed by Corin’s own sword on the child’s mother, who survives long enough to say, “He shall be named Conan.” She was so weak she lacked the breath to say, “Conan the Barbarian.” more