Released in 1984, Conan the Destroyer is the sequel to John Milius’s blood-drenched, mythic, testosterone-heavy Conan the Barbarian, a film that at least had the decency to pretend it was telling an epic. That film felt like a fever dream born of Nietzsche, Frank Frazetta, and a pound of cocaine. This one feels like it was written by three interns during a Dungeons & Dragons game in a Chuck E. Cheese.
Let’s start with the tone. The original was operatic, moody, brutal. This one? This one is a Saturday morning cartoon filtered through a vat of melted Crisco. Gone is Basil Poledouris’s thunderous score as the guiding force of the narrative. Gone is the philosophical mumbo-jumbo about steel and god and revenge. Instead, we get slapstick humor, a PG rating, and Wilt Chamberlain cosplaying as a mute bodyguard with the personality of a hat rack.
Arnold grunts and sword-fights his way through the movie like a man whose only direction was “flex harder.” And by God, he does. The man’s pecs deserve their own screen credit. But Schwarzenegger is playing a version of Conan who has clearly gone soft. It’s not just that he’s more talkative—he’s downright jolly. There’s a moment where he smiles. Smiles. Conan. The Cimmerian who watched his mother decapitated by snake cultists in the last movie. And now he’s giggling like a drunken hippie at a Renaissance fair.
The plot is a quest, because of course it is. A young virgin princess named Jehnna—played by a then-sixteen-year-old OLIVIA D’ABO—is tasked with retrieving a magic crystal to awaken a sleeping god. She needs Conan to escort her, along with her chaperone, Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain, wearing the stiffest costume this side of a Star Trek convention).