The not so serious tone of this film doesn't have the same feel of the movie before it. It's not horrid, just not in the league of the one before it.

Probably the better of the two as this one doesn't try and take itself nearly as seriously as the first. Watching it knowing that you can actually enjoy all the gags, even though I found it funny how when Arnold tries to talk like he is drunk,...
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Probably the better of the two as this one doesn't try and take itself nearly as seriously as the first. Watching it knowing that you can actually enjoy all the gags, even though I found it funny how when Arnold tries to talk like he is drunk, you can understand him as well as normal.

This came nowhere close to being a good sequel for the original.

Nostalgia does a lot for eighties action movies. While we’ve all long since seen the style and pace of films like Commando and The Running Man blown out of the water by John Woo’s Hong Kong heroic bloodshed, and even seen the...
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Nostalgia does a lot for eighties action movies. While we’ve all long since seen the style and pace of films like Commando and The Running Man blown out of the water by John Woo’s Hong Kong heroic bloodshed, and even seen the American action movie evolve with that influence from the east, going back to the golden Schwarzenegger era has become fun again. Whereas in the early to mid-nineties the idea of seeing your action hero firing a gun in one close shot, then cutting to some exploding barrels and falling stuntmen in the next seemed cliched and dated, now it’s got a quaint charm of it’s own. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the eighties fantasy epic (Conan the Barbarian excepted, which still owns.) Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings did fantasy properly, and it’s totally spoiled us. Going back to Conan the Destroyer you’ll see every cliche those films fought against. Conan the Destroyer’s dialogue is atrocious, the acting hammier than a Sunday roast at Miss Piggy’s, the fights clumsily choreographed, shot and edited, the attempts at comedy fall entirely flat and it’s all clear evidence that no one behind the camera deemed this movie good enough to be taken seriously. All of this is strange, because it’s predecessor was a serious attempt at bringing Robert E. Howard’s stories to the screen, and is still regarded as a classic among fans. Conan the Destroyer picks up Conan’s story not long after the previous film, with him still mourning the loss of Valeria. When he’s offered the chance of resurrecting her in exchange for guiding a princess to recover a jewel, he leads a party on the quest, unaware that he’s part of a more devious scheme. The supporting characters range from the token annoying princess who’s far too young to be the attractive female lead, an industrial strength bodyguard, a comedy thief who’s a bit like Short Round, only fifty and not funny, to Grace Jones who runs about, looks crazy and hits things with a big stick - actually pretty good casting in her case. On the plus side? Arnold’s not bad, some of the set design is actually pretty nice and at times approaches epic in it’s size. And of course it’s got ‘that’ music score by Basil Poledouris, but you might be better off listening to the CD and ignoring the film entirely to fully appreciate it. All told, it’s obviously something you should see and even own if you’re an Arnold completist, and there are a few moments of unintentional hilarity - the gorilla thing in the mirror room is fall on the floor funny - which stop it from being entirely unbearable, but it’s a film which sits in that strange halfway house of not being good enough to be a classic and not being bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, so you’re left with that overriding feeling of ‘don’t care’.