Conan the Barbarian Remake Falls Flat, Fails to Impress Critics

It was supposed to the big action flick of the weekend but if the critics have anything to say about, viewers won’t have a new action flick to be impressed by. Receiving a mere 24 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes (an aggregator of movie critic reviews), the Marcus Nispel-helmed epic looks like it’s failed before it’s even opened.

The plot revolves around a Cimmerian warrior, played by the hunky Jason Momoa, who is on a quest to avenge the murder of his father and the genocide of his village. If it sounds familiar, the movie is a remake originally starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the remake project was sort of doomed from the beginning. It spent years in development with even Brett Ratner attached to the project at one point. When the trailer first came out, it was railed as the worst trailer in history.

Some review highlights include the bad:

• USA Today: “Conan the Barbarian lives by a pretty simple ethos: He lives, he loves, he slays. What he doesn’t do, alas, is act.”
• San Francisco Chronicle: “Take a bad movie in two dimensions, film it in three, and what do you get? Three entire dimensions of lousy.”
• NPR: “There are swords and sorcery, pirates and monsters, taxed bodices and taxing mythology. In other words, there’s the bare minimum necessary to summon this dismal movie into existence.”
• Dallas Morning News: Dull and uninvolving, Conan the Barbarian occasionally verges on escaping its rut, but never makes good on the promise. It’s busy without having energy, a loud, lackluster mess.
• Daily Mirror: You’d think a film so heavy on sorcery and swordfights couldn’t go wrong, but Conan The Barbarian manages the twin feats of being both derivative and deathly dull.
• Boston Herald: ‘Conan’ More Brawn Than Brains

The good:

• Los Angeles Times: It’s kind of a wicked blast to watch, especially if you’re in the mood for some righteous revenge.
• New York Times: Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling.

Critics aren’t exactly the best predictors of movie success, will you go see it despite this?