Red Sonja

When Robert E. Howard's sword-wielding comic book universe was made into a film in the mid-80s, Red Sonja, like Conan the Barbarian, was of course in the centre of it all and I remember quite well how sadly disappointed I was with "Conan III", which revolved around Sonja's revenge and where a red-faced Brigitte Nielsen jumped around in a calfskin bra and whistled in what can best be described as one of the worst films of all time. When it was time for Red Sonja to be released outside its homeland, MGM chose to change the cover so that Arnold's Conan took up 90% of the screen space instead of Miss Nielsen. The name was also changed in the Swedish translation and Red Sonja became the Barbarians' Revenge. All to ride the Conan wave and all to avoid advertising the crap they were actually selling. Fast forward some years and everything old is, as usual, new again. Conan has been remade over and over again and when it's time for Sonja to avenge her mother's murderer during Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, it's B-movie stench and acting that belongs at the local improvisational theatre. But how bad is it? I'll tell you now: Come back, lousy Brigitte Nielsen. All is forgiven!

This does indeed look like a Saturday Night Live sketch and that's how the film feels. Like a bad joke.

Red Sonja opens with the usual prologue that reveals the same premise that the first film revolved around. Sonja is nine years old, part of the last Hyrkanian community on Earth. During a completely ordinary afternoon, barbarians with black teeth ride through the extremely poorly guarded gates of the village where she and her mother live, and kill everyone except the vengeful Sonja. We are told this but not seen it. The moment the barbarians storm through the corrugated iron gates and roar loudly, director M. J. Bassett cuts to a kind of Avatar-wannabe scene where an adult Sonja is sneaking around in a studio-built forest grove and talking to the trees. She caresses some bark. Eats some honey. Caresses a plant, talks to the plant. Talks to another tree, caresses another kind of plant, sits up in a tree and looks down at the set built entirely of egg cartons and sadness, and talks to the bark of the tree she is sitting in.

The blood and violence is childishly bad and adapted for a younger audience, which is completely brain-dead considering how violent the series is.

The rest of this movie contains more action than that but it doesn't get any better, quite the opposite. Sonja ends up in trouble of course in the pursuit of revenge, forced to fight for her poor life because the very evil Dragan. Luckily, she finds a band of rebellious bandits led by the utterly awful Michael Bisping, the UFC veteran, who can't even manage to deliver a single line without coming across as a moron. Revenge star Matilda Lutz isn't much better either, in the lead role, and fails miserably to bring Red Sonja to life. Lutz reads her lines inside out here, it's obvious that she's fighting tooth and nail to make the worthless basic material believable, but she lacks the capacity and, when the going gets tough, she lacks the ability to convince as a sword-wielding barbarian. Both Conan and Sonja deserve better than the Momoa reboot of a few years ago plus this garbage. Robert E. Howard's meaty comic book universe is filled with interesting mythology, brutal violence and hot romances and could certainly coexist with Deadpool, Wolverine, Batman and all the other spandex-clad men in today's comics-fixated film world. That's why it's sad that this adaptation, just like the latest Conan film, stinks and will mean that we'll have to wait another 40+ years for the next attempt.