When I was reviewing Conan the Barbarian, I read a few pages of the discussions on the IMDb boards (for once they weren’t just filled with flame wars). From these I gathered that the orthodoxy in Conan fandom is to regard Conan the Destroyer as the clearly inferior movie. Consequently I started watching it with the expectation that it would be even worse than Conan the Barbarian, when, as it turned out, the sequel was in fact the better movie, if only marginally.


One of the reasons for this might have been the more unitary feeling of Destroyer. It was unencumbered by Barbarian’s origin story (I usually enjoy origin stories, so I’ve been unable to understand why people always speak negatively about them, but Barbarian really turned that around for me), and the need to tie this to the main plot, if only loosely. Instead it could do an almost in medias res opening, where it jumped right to the action (if not the main plot; hence the “almost”), and then did the exposition.

The plot itself wasn’t too bad either, really. It was a fairly standard quest plot any DM would have nodded at least semi-approvingly to (even if some might have had qualms about having so important tasks performed by NPCs, and some might complain about the low power level of both the level bosses), where Conan is hired to escort a princess to the fortress of a mighty magician (a horribly malplaced and misused Amon Thoth) where she must steal his magic gem. They naturally gather with them a band of friends and sidekicks, so that what you finally end up with is a variety of the fairytale of Espen Askeladd and the Seven Good Helpers.

These sidekicks were decent. The producers had obviously been as sick of the impossibly fake facial hair of Conan’s rogue sidekick from Barbarian, so they’d replaced him with a slightly more shaved one who apart from the fact that he used daggers instead of a bow was the exact same (as rogues are wont to do). In general, they seemed to have tired of obviously fake hair altogether, as where the first movie abounded with them, they seem to have been replaced by a bit more sombre hairstyles in Destroyer. To get back to the characters, though, they were pretty much your staple fantasy ones. You have the greedy and cowardly thief who’s really a brave and good guy; there was the excentric and unimpressive, yet extremely powerful wizard; the fierce barbarian woman; the innocent virgin princess; and the hulking, secretly evil bodyguard sent with the princess by her equally evil sorceress-queen aunt, to protect the princess’ virginity from the only slightly less big, hulking barbarian warrior.

None of the actors really stood out in their roles. Arnold was still decent; he had a few more lines in this movie, including some mildly amusing jokes, but while he was nothing like the wisecracking charmer some of the IMDb people negatively painted him as, neither did he have the charisma to take the charm thing to its required heights or the dramatic gravitas to carry what I guess was meant to be emotional scenes. The rest were just meh.

Except, of course, the villains. While the evil sorceress-queen showed some promise, but got too little screentime to make anything out of it, the way Amon Thoth was protrayed was just dumb. He was played up as this mighty magician who Conan’d need help of another magician to get rid off, but when the final showdown comes the magician does not utilise his assumed powerful and subtle skills, but rather transforms into a giant ape that Conan could more or less chop to pieces at his convenience. Not to mention that Amon Thoth, one of if not the biggest Conan villains of all time, was used as a minor villain who seemed ridiculously easily to defeat. Finally, the “god” the sorceress-queen summoned and Conan had to battle at the end of the movie wasn’t all that much either. Rather than transforming into a beautiful magician or something, it metamorphed into a humungous, two-legged toad with flippers, whose weakness was so screamingly obvious I was almost struck dumb by it all.

All in all, though, the movie was more enjoyable than Barbarian, if only barely. 4.5/10 (weak).

(On a side note, it was fun to see that L. Sprague de Camp had been hired as a “technical consultant” both on this one and Barbarian.)