"I live. I love. I slay. I am content."

[Magus]

I like the part where Conan kills dudes.

Unfortunately they forgot all the other parts.

But seriously A+ on the battles. This is one gory, brutal killfest. I'm just disappointed at the disjointed narrative and nearly zero dialogue for Conan that isn't some version of "Now you die!". Ron Perlman (who ironically was to originally play Conan in the animated Red Nails adaptation that never seemed to get released) as Conan's father is a fairly well developed character and then...that's it. At least we feel sorry when he gets burnt alive, but it's unfortunate he couldn't teach Conan to string together more than two sentences at a time.

Also, I never really got a feel for the Hyborean age. This wasn't helped by the replacement of the awesome Asian wizard dude from the first movie with Morgan Freeman as the narrator. "Between the drowning of Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryus, lay an age undreamed of!" just sounds pretty lame when Morgan Freeman phones it in instead of really declaiming it like the original fellow. And even hiring Morgan Freeman to do narration is the cheesiest, cliche thing to do, I mean seriously. The man has narrated everything from penguin documentaries to credit card commercials, I can safely say that he is 1. not suited for epic fantasy narration and 2. overdone even if he were.

But what really makes Hyborea kind of lame is we get no feel for the gigantic ass cities they designed. Conan zips from one to another with nary a pause. Maybe I wanted to find out more about Hyrkania or Argolia the City of Thieves or whatever. Instead we see a CGI distance shot, Conan and whoever else is with him walking for about two seconds through a Middle-Eastern flavored place, and then repeat. Zero time is spent at any of these locations.

The villains are not very compelling, either. To try and outdo the amazing performance by James Earl Jones from the first film would have been difficult, but something approaching the calm collectedness of Thulsa Doom would have been way better than the slavering, cackling villains we get. Kolar Zym is just a brutal warlord who wants to complete his black magic mask (which ironically like most super ultra powerful magic items in these movies, ends up not really doing anything, though I did enjoy the fact that it turned out to be a giant spider parasite that attaches to your head when it's returned to life) from shards stolen thousands of years ago so he can bring back his wife and conquer the world. He's assisted by his psycho witch daughter. Neither is particularly interesting, except for some slightly creepy implied incest going on there.

There are a few side characters who help Conan out, such as his big giant buddy and his little thief dude he helps, but we barely see these characters and they don't really go on an adventure together like in the first film, the just pop up once in a while to help Conan out. Instead Conan is mostly paired with Tamaria, who seems to fulfill the role of Valeria from the books and first movie, since she can fight pretty good and saves Conan's life a few times. Apparently they teach the nuns how to chop off heads the same as the monks at that monastery.

And that is this movie's only saving grace, which is that the battles were pretty incredible. I haven't seen so many ridiculous deaths since Machete or Punisher: War Zone, and this may have topped the former. It's a good time and I can't say I didn't enjoy myself, but the movie would be severely lacking in rewatch value, I can say that much. It's definitely an enjoyable roller coaster ride the first time, but you have to sort of shut your brain off and enjoy seeing bad guys get their skulls caved in or chopped off.

EDIT: Oh, and another bad and ironic thing about Ron Perlman: this movie was originally going to be a King Conan movie, a sequel instead of a reboot, with an older Conan who has already conquered Aquilonia, so Perlman could play Conan, and I can safely say he would have been way better than Jason Mamoa, unfortunately. Instead we get Jason Mamoa apparently forgetting any lessons he learned playing Khal Drogo on the amazing Game of Thrones, which was seriously a great performance, and just delivering mindless lines in the most grunting way possible.

ANOTHER EDIT: Actually, I'll say what I said to my bro when asked about this movie, as I think this sums it up best: "It is The Scorpion King with several years worth of better CGI and more blood." If you liked The Scorpion King or movies like that you will like this movie, if you can't stand mindless action, avoid it.