With the behind the scenes struggles covered, let’s take a look at some specific points where Highlander: Endgame fell apart despite the fact that someone, maybe even most of the folks involved, really wanted to make a good movie.

Shaky Groundwork

Highlander: Endgame was meant to be a bridge between the movies starring Christopher Lambert and the TV show starring Adrian Paul. (We’ll just pretend that the show’s pilot episode didn’t already do this just fine.) As such, it brings in elements from both franchises, but really only does so to shove them out of the way.

Hearkening back to the original film, the movie opens with a voiceover on text, this time with Christopher Lambert filling Sean Connery’s role:

In the days before memory, there were the immortals. We were with you then, and we are with you now. We are driven by the endless fight to survive in a game which knows no limit of time or place. We are the seeds of legend, but our true origins are unknown. We simply are.

That’s some pretty good stuff, focusing on the immortals as beings of magic and legend who have followed humanity through the ages. The last bit is admittedly a little out of place in this movie, which never touches on the origins of immortals. It would probably fit better in a film that tried to explore the source of immortality.

No! Go away! You don’t exist yet!

Ahem….anyway…

We open up in New York, “10 years ago.” 10 years ago…which is already confusing. Highlanderhas typically been set in the present day, and this film came out in 2000. The opening scene depicts the last time Duncan and Connor were together, but the TV series launched in 1992, so the timeline starts out of whack from the get-go.

Why are Connor and Duncan hanging out in New York? We don’t know, and neither does Duncan. Connor called him all the way over from the west coast, but immediately blows him off for unexplained reasons. The film wants to set up some sort of deep angst within Connor to start this off, but doesn’t pay attention to little details like, “Why is this happening?” This is a problem that plagues the entire movie.

Ultimately, our muddled flashback ends with Rachel Ellenstein, a girl that Connor raised in the first film, getting blown up by our (currently mysterious) villain. There’s the bridge back to the original film, but it too is muddled. Connor left his antique shop to Rachel and moved out of New York after defeating the Kurgan, in no small part because his alias, Russel Nash, was wanted for multiple counts of murder.

Maybe Connor came back, somehow and for some reason. Maybe he knew Rachel was in danger. We’ll never know, because the scene only exists to kill an interesting character from the first film. Rachel’s death creates angst for Connor, and he goes into hiding for a decade as a result of it.

The opening is a symptom of the film’s problems, and of the franchise’s problems as a whole. When Highlander is particularly bad, it gets ahead of itself in trying to set up grand tragedies or massive storylines. It fails to lay stable groundwork for its emotional scenes, and thus doesn’t build to a satisfying payoff. We’re supposed to accept that Connor is so broken up by Rachel’s death that he sequesters himself for years, but we as the audience don’t even know what their relationship is. Has he been with her since he defeated the Kurgan, for some reason not running off to Scotland like the first film showed? Did they have a reunion? Do they even exchange Christmas cards? We don’t know, and the movie doesn’t want to tell us. It just wants us to feel a big sad.

The Problems with Sanctuary

It’s worth noting that the opening scene of this movie only shows up on the DVD version of the film, not the theatrical release. Among Endgame‘s many problems was the fact that the movie wasn’t finished at the time of release; several scenes were left out and some effects were unfinished. I feel that had the filmmakers received time to actually make a professional product, maybe this movie would have been salvageable. Then again, the Highlander franchise is a masterclass in what might have been.

Regardless, Rachel’s death leads Connor to retreat to a place called Sanctuary, where immortals go to be put into a sort of stasis and remove themselves from the Game. Like most things in the movie, this is…very poorly explained at best. We don’t know how Connor knows about it, and the whole thing is apparently run by the Watchers, a secret organization whose motto is, “Observe and record, but never interfere. Now, admittedly, the Watchers were never good at the non-interference part of their oath, but why they would advertise their existence to immortals is absolutely baffling.

Connor’s time in Sanctuary does provide a low-key retcon to Highlander II and Highlander III: where the films diverge from the TV show’s continuity, Connor was simply hallucinating while in a drug-induced coma. It’s clumsy and pointless; you can just ignore the presence of stuff fans want to forget without trying to force an explanation that amounts to the same thing.

While in his dream state, Connor flashes back to his time in the Scottish highlands when his former clan chose to burn his mother alive for raising a hellspawn. This sends Connor back home in a rampage, in which he kills the father of Jacob Kell, our movie’s villain and the guy who is stalking Connor to make his life miserable (and doing it badly…more on that later).

In fact, Kell arrives at Sanctuary to slaughter the immortals gathered there, and this is one scene that got fans’ knickers in a twist. See, this immortal sanctuary is specifically mentioned as holy ground. As in that one place where no immortal can ever fight. As in the place where the one time in recorded history where an immortal killed another immortal on holy ground, the entire city of Pompeii got destroyed. Now Kell leads a band of evil immortals to the sanctuary, kills all the monks, and then decapitates the dozen or so helpless immortals there. The result? Nothing. Nothing happens. Turns out that the whole holy ground thing is all a myth and that immortals just like to handicap themselves that way just because.

The fact that Kell cut down a bunch of immortals on holy ground with no consequences resulted in a massive fan backlash. In the DVD release, the movie was edited to remove all references as the place as holy ground. But it’s still obviously holy ground. The immortals are in a church. They are protected by monks. And let’s not forget that the only place this immortal sanctuary would make sense is if it was on holy ground. Why else would immortals willingly incapacitate themselves? Putting yourself in a drug-induced coma anywhere but on holy ground is a death writ for an immortal.

Most pieces of this film read like a group of writers were spitballing ideas for future Highlander stories, only to have someone write down the half-baked ideas and string them together into one incomprehensible movie. The immortal Sanctuary is a glaring example of that.

The Big Action Setpiece, then lots of Boredom

Meanwhile, Duncan senses something strange because…um, Connor and Duncan are apparently psychically linked now? He goes to Methos, and everyone cheers! Hold your applause, though – Methos is just here for a cameo. He’s got two pointless scenes in this movie and then he’s gone! Methos tells Duncan about the immortal sanctuary where Connor was and also reveals that the immortals there are all dead now. He also casually mentions that he knew Connor, which is weird. Can we get some explanation as to when Methos met Connor? Please?

After some pointless flashbacks where we see Duncan meet a new sex object love interest and where Connor shows Duncan some sort of fencing super-move, Duncan heads to Connor’s old shop. You’d think that in New York City a burned out building in a classy downtown area would have been cleaned up and sold off within ten years, but that’s apparently not true. Duncan goes up onto the second floor and senses an immortal. But it’s not Connor – it’s Kate, the love of Duncan’s life who we just met briefly in the flashback. And she calls herself Faith now, for some reason that will never get explained.

Regardless, let’s skip to the fight scene! This is one of the few areas where the bigger budget and longer runtime of the movie thrive, and it’s aided in large part because martial arts master Donnie Yen plays one of the bad guys. Sure, there’s this stupid bit where Kell’s gang of evilimmortals, of which Kate is a member, runs motorcycles in through the windows of the second floor of Connor’s old shop, but whatever. It’s a sword fight!

Yen, who plays the immortal Jing Ke, did the fight choreography for this scene, and it is probably the high point in the film. Frustratingly, his character is criminally underused–more frustrating because he’s based on the real-life Jing Ke, a Chinese warrior who is best known for his failed assassination of China’s first emperor in the 3rd century BC. The movie had an ancient immortal, a badass warrior with a code of honor, who has a lot of history behind him, and relegated him to the background. To compound the irritation even further, he goes toe-to-toe with Duncan, giving our hero an even fight that he rarely gets. But this fight scene is the only one Jing Ke gets–he’ll go down without a fight later on.

This great scene ends when Kell shows up and shoots Duncan, knocking him out the window and getting him impaled by rebar. Then some Watchers who have followed Duncan around kidnap him and bring them to a new Sanctuary, where they hope to keep Duncan hidden so Kell never becomes the last immortal and never wins the Prize.

The movie really wants to present Kell as some sort of supervillain, but fails to do so effectively. All the action at this point has been handled by his mooks. His screen presence is basically nonexistent. He effectively does nothing for 90% of the film except deliver boring speeches, chew scenery, and talk about how naughty he is. The promise made by the trailer was an immortal with powers beyond his kin who could not be defeated by only one MacLeod. Instead, the film just gives us a guy with a gun.

What Exactly is Kell’s Plan, Anyway?

Jacob Kell is the biggest weakness of this entire movie because he never earns the villain credit that the film tries to bestow upon him. This gets highlighted when Joe and Methos free Duncan and try to warn him away from facing Kell by doing some simple number crunching. See, Kell has killed 661 immortals, while Connor has only killed 262 immortals and Duncan has only killed 174. That makes Kell the biggest bad guy ever because…wait, what?

How many fucking immortals are there? I know the TV show had a population explosion among the immortals, but apparently there are thousands of them now? How is this kept under wraps? Hundreds I can see – a thousand through the ages, okay. But between three immortals, we have a total of 1,097 immortal kills? And how many did Methos kill when he was a part of the Four Horsemen? What about Jing Ke and the rest of Kell’s gang? Amanda? Richie? Since the Gathering has begun, why has no one on the whole planet noticed the sudden spike in headless corpses?

But that question us just small potatoes. The real problem with Joe’s little laptop presentation is the idea that X number of quickenings = most powerful immortal ever. Duncan has fought dozens of immortals in the series, including guys who were around for thousands of years killing other immortals. This isn’t Dragonball Z. Kell’s power level is not over 9,000 – the number of heads he’s taken doesn’t make him all-powerful. Hell, if just decapitations is what matters, how did Kell get to this point in the first place. He’s 500 years old – he must have taken the head of someone who had many more kills than him at some point. How did Richie manage to win any fights at all in the series, since he was a total newbie against immortals who had centuries of head-chopping experience? Sword fights are not math.

I really don’t get how the Watchers’ confirmed kills database works. Do they weight these things? I mean, Connor killed the Kurgan, who was repeatedly said (and shown) to be the most powerful immortal. The dude could punch through stone walls. Does the Kurgan only equal one kill? The implication from the database is that Connor killing the Kurgan is equal to someone killing a total newbie immortal. That can’t be right, can it?

That’s Problem One with the scenes that follow. Things get really highlighted when Duncan goes to the site of the original Sanctuary, finds that Connor is still alive, and gets his first face-to-face with Kell.

Connor draws his sword on Kell, and the two fight in a graveyard, all without anyone mentioning that they are obviously on holy ground. Well, that’s what happens in the DVD release; in the theatrical film, Connor acknowledges that they’re on holy ground and fights anyway. But just like Highlander II tried to replace mention of the planet Zeist with a vague “distant past,” the caretakers of the franchise cut some dialogue but keep everything else the same in the hope that nobody notices the glaring problems.

Connor puts up very little fight for a 500-year-old master swordsman and is at the mercy of Kell. But then Kell reveals the full stupidity of his master plan: rather than simply kill Connor over the death of his father ages ago, he is going to kill everyone Connor loves and make him suffer forever. And…well, if that’s his plan, he’s really bad at it.

If Kell is making Connor suffer, he’s sure as hell procrastinating about it. Virtually everyone important in Connor’s life has lived many years in happiness with him. Presumably Brenda got killed before her time, although that scene never made it into the final cut of the movie. Beyond that, who has Kell stolen from Connor?

Rachel? Connor met her when she was a little girl. She had fifty years of happiness with Connor. Yeah, it’s tragic how she died, but that’s five decades. That’s practically an entire mortal lifetime. What about Heather? Connor was happily married to her until she died of old age. Bang up job of making him suffer there, Kell. What about Ramirez? Oh, he died, but the Kurgan was the guy who did the job. Hell, what about Duncan? Who in the last 400 years has meant more to Connor than his clansman Duncan? Why haven’t you killed Duncan? WHY???

So now we’ve covered two of Endgame‘s major sins: lies during pre-release and a desperately bad villain whose evil plot simply does not mesh with the franchise we’ve been given up to this point. How does it get worse? Well, there’s still an ending that it fails to land. The worst of Highlander: Endgame is yet to come…next time.