No one ever turns into a giant snake in the new “Conan the Barbarian.”
That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with this remake: The knowing sense of big, ridiculous fun that marked the 1982 original is gone, and in its place we get a self-serious series of generic sword battles and expository conversations.
Fight, talk, fight, talk, fight, talk, then an enormous throwdown followed by a denouement that dangles the possibility of a sequel (dear God, no) — that’s the basic structure here. And yet, despite seeming so simplistic, director Marcus Nispel’s film is mind-numbingly convoluted. The fact that it’s been converted to a murky, smudgy, barely used 3-D doesn’t help matters. At one point, I scrawled in my notes: “Incomprehensible underwater serpent attack.” There you have it.
The script is credited to three writers, based on Robert E. Howard’s Conan character, but everyone involved would probably prefer that you not think of this as a remake.
Remakes have become Nispel’s bread and butter in recent years. The longtime music-video director also made the 2003 version of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and the 2009 version of “Friday the 13th.” But while the original “Conan” — the movie that signaled the arrival of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a bona fide movie star — looks extremely dated nearly 30 years later, it still functions just fine as both an epic adventure tale and an admitted guilty pleasure.