I don’t care what anyone else says but to me, the first “Highlander” was a good movie that won me over with its surprisingly original sword and sorcery plot and its well-choreographed action scenes. “Highlander II: The Quickening” feels like it was made by people who hadn’t even seen the original.

The ozone layer is gone and the people of Earth are being killed by the radiation from the Sun until ‘Highlander’ Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert “Fortress”, “Highlander”) makes the ‘Shield’ to protect the world. Now in the 2020s the world is a bleak future and with a restored ozone layer MacLeod must destroy the ‘Shield’ as well as defeat the evil General Katana (Michael Ironside “Total Recall”) from the alien world Zeist (the same place the ‘Highlanders’ are from).

Christopher Lambert got the part in the first film for his sword skills but due to the weakness of the sword fights in this one he proves utterly useless as we all know he’s a terrible actor. Sean Connery (“Thunderball”, “The Rock”) returns as Ramirez and does a good job providing a few laughs. The villain General Katana is very bland to say the least. Also, there are two annoying bad guys from Zeist.

“Highlander II: The Quickening” repeatedly contradicts the original film, it has plot points that only serve as a means to quickly fix problems that would require good writing skills, it has corny special effects, it has an absurd premise and the action sequences aren’t half as good as they were in the original. It has some laughs in it but everything else is so half-baked so this is clearly a movie where the filmmakers said “We want to do this” and there was nobody there to talk sense into them. The strangest thing is that this was made by Russell Mulcahy, who directed the first “Highlander”. I think the catchphrase from the original “There can only be one” was more of a statement about sequels than anything else.