You know, they say that a lot of our fond memories are based on the specific time-period in which they took place and a wide variety of factors make them stand out in our minds as being great experiences and many of these memories can be tarnished by attempting to go back and relive them in the current day.
This has been true for me with many things such as going to my old college town for Homecoming as well as doing some ecstasy as a 38 year old and hating the whole experience. This has also been true when it comes to fond memories of great times that I had with certain videogames only to emulate them on modern machines and absolutely hate it within 5 minutes.
Nowhere is this more profound for me than in cinema though, especially fantasy or science fiction whose abilities to be represented on screen has evolved and improved such a huge amount since the mid 80's.
Highlander is one of those films that if you talk to any male over the age of 40, they are likely to respond with how amazing this film is and how you absolutely must go find it and see it. I'm here to tell you that you definitely should not do this. If you were a fan of it in the late 80's when it was released, I think your imagination and internal memories are definitely better than this film actually is.
For one thing, the film is a mess of timelines and while it isn't exactly super difficult to figure out, it is a mish-mash of a lot of different genres all at once. We have time-travel, we have immortals, we have a terminator type creature, and we have a lot of swordplay giving it a fantasy sort of appeal even though a lot of the film takes place in what was then the modern age where firearms definitely were a thing.
Then we also need to talk about the actors involved. Sean Connery was, excuse my French, the shit in the 60's to the 80's but he is also known for being completely unwilling or incapable of being anyone other than a Scotsman. In this film he plays Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez, who is an immortal Egyptian who lived in Japan and Spain but somehow, SOMEHOW, ended up with a very distinctly Scottish accent. I don't know if Connery has ever changed his accent for anything he has ever been in, but he certainly didn't for Highlander.
Then there is Christopher Lambert, who is is the main protagonist in this film. Go ahead and disagree with me on this if you must, but Lambert is NOT a good actor. In this film he is an American immigrant that runs an antique store, but somehow manages to sound as though he doesn't have command of the English language in every word of dialogue that he utters. He sounds stiff like he doesn't really understand the words that he is reading and this would make sense if that was who the character is, but that isn't what he is in this film. This could be rooted in the fact that while he was technically born in America, he lived most of his young life in Switzerland and France.
Then we have the swordfights, which I think most people would argue is the meat and potatoes of the entire film. While they might have been cutting edge in 1986, just like the light-saber duals in the original Star Wars trilogy, we have come a long ways since then as far as portraying sword violence on screen is concerned.
I guess you could say it is more authentic but a lot of it just comes across as quite slow and lazy and the overuse of the sound effects for swords making contact with one another is clearly synthesized and by my own standards, is just kind of hokey and lame.
Highlander is famous for some reason but when it was released it was a commercial flop, not even coming close to making back its relatively small $19 million budget. It received mixed to negative reviews at the time, but fanbois like myself that were really into things like D&D at the time, still kept it close to our hearts.
The special effects that were available at the time also are not great by today's standards but they must have really liked how someone somewhere in the 80's figured out how to get reasonable representation of lightning on screen and boy oh boy, did they use that a lot in Highlander.
In the end the whole thing was kind of a slog to revisit and ruined a lot of the ideas I had in my idea about this being an epic film. I was reminded about how Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights stated that Highlander won the award for "best movie ever" but when his driving opponent watched it he says "by the way, I watched Highlander... it was shit!" and well, I'm sorry but I have to agree with Jean Girard from Talladega Nights.
Should I watch it?
I think that there are very few good reasons to go back and watch this "classic" unless you want to destroy your childhood memories the way in which I just did. Time has not been kind to this movie whereas if you go and watch Terminator which was made around the same time, it doesn't look so awful like this one does. I think there are some legit reasons why it did poorly at the time of its release and if you haven't seen this one, you don't need to. If you HAVE seen it and have great memories of it, do yourself a favor and just leave it in your memories, unspoiled.
this film can be legally streamed on Roku, FuboTV, or VUDU for free (some versions have ads). You can also watch the entire movie broken into 5 minute pieces on YouTube, for some reason they don't have a problem with that