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Watching the 2011 Conan, I came to the glum realization that Robert E. Howard’s grim barbarian might not be all that adaptable to film. The Conan of Howard’s stories “lives, loves, slays, and is content,” but that sort of aimless wandering doesn’t make for good film — or at least not the kind of film Hollywood will actually produce. The temptation to squeeze in some sort of world-saving or paternal revenge plot (or, in this case, both at the same time) is simply too great.

Hey, this looks awesome! Is this in the movie? No. No, it isn't.

Let me start off by saying that I am not an impartial audience. I went into Conan 2011 with the feeling that it would not hold a candle to the 1982 Milius film. I felt the same way coming out of it. Conan 2011 would have worked better if they’d just called it The Scorpion King III.

The story will be very familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a no-budget sword-and-sandal movie from the Eighties. A mystical gewgaw (the Mask of Acheron) has the power to raise the dead and make the user totally invincible and stuff — only not really, and we’ll get to that in a little while. The mask was split up into several fragments, and now the evil necromancer Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) is searching for the final pieces to bring his wife back from the dead and conquer the world, in that order.

Apparently, no sword-and-sorcery movie is complete without a good village-wiping-outing, and Conan makes no exception. The Milius film did the same thing. The only difference is, the 2011 film takes its own sweet time getting there.

After the requisite opening narration (“between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis,” performed by the now-cliched Morgan Freeman), we are treated to the opening shot of a sword slicing through a woman’s womb from the inside. I would love to say this is something I’m irresponsibly making up, but I’m not. Conan was “born into battle,” therefore someone thought it was a good idea to show an unborn baby nearly getting impaled. Then his father Corin (Ron Perlman) cuts the young Conan out of his mother’s stomach while she’s still alive and holds up his bloody, flailing infant body. Cue opening credits. Far be it for me to wax squeamish about blood & guts in a Conan film, I guess, but I wish the screenwriters had put down the bong long enough to realize how ridiculous that would look on film.

We move on to the Cimmerian equivalent of an egg-and-spoon race, wherein all the young Cimmerians must run through the woods holding quail eggs in their mouths without breaking them. Conan, of course, is way more badass than the other kids, so he beats up ten Picts and still wins the race, spitting his egg out unbroken. (Still sounds like I’m making it up, doesn’t it?) We then move on to a tepid, lifeless, mostly incoherent re-hash of the “riddle of steel” sequence cribbed straight from the Milius film. Whenever I see something like this, I always think of Tom Servo’s quote from the MST3K episode Overdrawn at the Memory Bank: “Never show a good film in the middle of your crappy one.”

If the movie had been 90 minutes of this guy threatening people, I'd probably have been happy.

So anyway, Khalar Zym shows up and wipes out Conan’s village. If you’ve seen Beastmaster (1982), you know exactly what happens here. All that’s missing is a heroic dog. The scale of the assault is ramped way up, because it’s 2011 and CG armies are cheap. (Zym’s armies spend a lot of time firing arrows into their own ranks, because apparently necromancers aren’t picky about the intelligence of their recruits.) There’s a long, turgid battle scene, one in a series of long, turgid battle scenes, all of which are clumsily choreographed and shot in unwatchable shaky-cam. If you’re thinking of watching Conan for the awesome fight scenes, brace for disappointment.

Back to the massacre. Zym is looking for the last piece of the Mask of Acheron (the movie mercifully spares us from the collection of the plot coupons), which Corin just happens to have. Zym kills Conan’s father and rides off to await the second act. Thankfully, there is no Wheel of Pain or montage; L’il Conan, having survived the slaughter, simply holds up his sword and yells, and then in the next scene he’s all grown up and slaying people, freeing slaves and throwing half-naked slave girls over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, like ya do.

It barely needs to be mentioned that the Conan movie has little or nothing to do with Howard’s stories. This is nothing new. Even the villain of the Milius film, Thulsa Doom, was actually a villain from a Kull the Conqueror story. However, the 2011 Conan throws in extra irritation by making several references to the Howard stories, while showing none of it on-screen. Hey, Conan, remember when we got in this awesome adventure at the Tower of the Elephant? Good times. Well, nevermind, we’ve got other stuff going on.

Tamara is a strong female character, if by "strong" you are actually referring to the ropes binding her through most of the movie.

The revenge plot unfolds apace. Khalar Zym needs a “woman of pure blood” to complete his spooky ritual, and so travels around with his Gothed-out airhead of a daughter Marique (the ever-bland Rose McGowan), killing people to prove various point and generally being menacing. The pure-blooded woman in question, a monk named Tamara (Rachel Nichols) flees from the bad guys, straight into Conan’s arms, and the game is afoot.

Rather than cover the galumphing middle act of the film, I’ll just hit the highlights. First of all, it should come as no surprise that being a woman in the Conan universe sucks. Marique is a creepy psychopath with the hots for her dad. Tamara gets to put on some armor and kick some ass for about five minutes, and then is strapped to a big wagon wheel to scream helplessly for the last third of the film. Every other female exists only to take their tops off or to be violently killed. Possibly both. I’m not arguing that this is out of character for the genre, I’m just saying the movie desperately needed a Valeria, and we didn’t get one.

While the storyline is predictable and seems to drag on forever, there are a few highlights. First, Stephen Lang as Khalar Zym is intensely fun as a villain. He growls, he stalks around, he bares his teeth, and looks really good doing it. Second, the set design is ambitious and frequently beautiful, and the one thing in the film that’s genuinely evocative of Howard’s stories. Sprawling caves, brooding monasteries, and gloomy ruins abound. It’s a shame they feel wasted, but they’re fun to look at all the same.

Rose McGowan IS Jackie Earl Haley as Freddy Kreuger.

Unfortunately, the low points are far more numerous. My favorite moment in the movie had to be the battle in the middle act featuring a horde of sand-people. I don’t mean Tusken Raiders wearing goggles and bandages, I mean guys actually made of sand, summoned up by eldritch magic. The thing is, they looked and acted perfectly human, only they were made of sand. They weren’t particularly durable. They didn’t have any special powers. They were just like any other disposable henchman. Except they’re sand. So, Conan wins big bonus points for the the most comically underwhelming dark sorcery ever.

There’s also the matter of the climax. Did you ever see Blade? Remember when Deacon Frost talks about La Magra, the Blood Good, and how when La Magra comes to town everyone in his path will instantly be turned into a vampire? Only what actually happens is that Deacon Frost turns sort of invincible for a few minutes, but not really, because Blade still kills him inside of five minutes? The Mask of Acheron is just like that. The dark necromantic artifact from the surly empire of Acheron doesn’t actually do anything. The only difference I noticed was that the villain’s IQ seemed to drop sharply near the end, as he falls for one of the oldest chestnuts in the book.

Conan 2011 is not a terrible film. In truth, it’s just another mediocre fantasy movie that would have been right at home in 1982. To a well-heeled fan of the genre, it offers nothing you haven’t seen before, save perhaps several objects floating awkwardly in the foreground, a by-product of the risible 3D revolution. Fans of Robert E. Howard looking for a fitting adaptation will likely come away with their hopes unfulfilled. But, if you’re just going in for the blood and mayhem, that much the film can and does deliver.