Highlander: The Source (2007)

I know very little about the Highlander mythos, beyond the fact that it involves a lot of head-chopping and basically gets rebooted with every film; I know enough about general filmic matters, though, to realize that this fifth entry in the moribund series is incompetent and muddled to the point of hilarity. Though it premiered on the Sci Fi Channel, that repository of goofy crap, the brutal pan-and-scan job speaks to an assumed theatrical release, which makes me wonder how little the producers think of the dwindling Highlander fanbase to think that this low-rent hackwork would drag them into a multiplex. Ostensibly about Duncan MacLeod and friends as they journey towards The Source (a mystical, vaguely defined MacGuffin), the real business of the film nevertheless seems to be how much ridiculousness can be spun out as they go. Here's your superfast hulking albino bellowing, "THE QUICKENING!" Here's your predictably silly death scene of a major supporting character, complete with overwrought goodbye speech. Here's your brooding, drippy main character, played by Adrian Paul perpetually on the verge of tears, as though he were a fifteen-year-old emo boy in too-tight black jeans. Here's your now-standard retconning of series lore (the "hallowed ground" denial, for one). Here's your heroes being fed gobs of exposition by Jabba the Hut. Here's your awesomely awful montage set to lame music (here, Queen's songs from the original film turned into bad cock-rock), which happens not once, not twice but three times in thirty minutes. Here's "Do it, you immortal fuck!" which only becomes funnier when the obscenity is bleeped out. Here's your nauseating New Age ending. I could go on, but I think the point has been made: If you've nothing invested in this series, The Source is a barrel of laughs.

Grade: C-