DVD review
Directed by: Russell Mulcahy
Starring: Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Roxanne Hart, Clancy Brown

There can be only one! Well, there should have been… But does the original Highlander still have a kind of magic?

Released in 1986 to less-than-rapturous acclaim, Highlander is one of many films of the period that gained a strong cult following on video. Despite a long line of terrible sequels, two spin-off series and some extremely ill advised animated versions, the original movie remains a wonderful, standalone piece, undeserving of such a shabby and unnecessary legacy.

The film boasts a strong visual style, courtesy of pop promo director Russell Mulcahy, who kick-started MTV and established music videos as an art form through work with Elton John and Duran Duran.

It tells the tale of a man who cannot die and who competes in sword fights to the death as history unfolds around him. The only way that he and the other combatants can be killed is by decapitation, at which point strange energy is released. Once a final victor emerges, the winner receives a mystical prize…

It’s a silly idea, filled with mystery that never really gets explained, and yet it works like a dream. Any explanation as to the origins of these immortals is left, quite rightly, to the audience and eventually (and less satisfactorily) to the sequels.

Christopher Lambert makes for an engaging hero as Connor MacLeod, his brooding performance style lending a sense of tragedy and weary despair to the reluctant protagonist. Though he doesn’t sound even remotely Scottish, it matters little. He is an outcast from his village and his lack of Scottish brogue makes him seem all the more alien to the surrounding culture.

The sequences in Scotland, as MacLeod's wife (Beatie Edney) grows old while he retains his youthful appearance, are effectively handled, as is his relationship with the young girl who becomes his secretary (played with pathos by Sheila Gish). It seems a pity, then, that main love interest Roxanne Hart does not come across nearly as well.

Sean Connery is charming in what is really an extended cameo as MacLeod’s suave mentor, Ramirez. His accent doesn’t correspond to MacLeod's description of him as the ‘Spanish Peacock’, but it wouldn't be Sean Connery if he spoke in any other way!

As the Kurgan, Clancy Brown emerges as a truly terrifying threat. His early presence during a ferocious highland battle is genuinely unsettling, and his later incarnation as a punk in 1980s New York the perfect combination of humour and menace. Whenever he appears on screen, there's a feeling that anything could happen, and a genuine sense that MacLeod might not defeat him.

The music by Queen, with orchestrations by Michael Kamen, underlines the film's emotional weight. Queen tone down the camp they brought to Flash Gordon and play up the emotional content, particularly on Who Wants to Live Forever, which segues into Kamen’s rich orchestration. They remember how to have fun though, with Freddie Mercury given the chance to blast through New York, New York and the evergreen It’s a Kind of Magic, which closes the film in jubilant style.

But, despite the music, Mulcahy’s style is so cinematic that the film never looks like an extended promo. Creative and original editing makes the film stand out in a genre that was already overcrowded, and Mulcahy’s use of transitions – that take us from a fish tank to the surface of a loch, and from a wrecked New York car park to the Scottish Highlands, seemingly in one shot – are just as breathtaking now as they were then.

The extras include an all-new commentary by Mulcahy; a rather charming interview with Lambert (speaking in French, and at full throttle); and a lengthy documentary, looking in considerable detail at the making of the film. It doesn’t boast the widest selection of features (any deleted scenes have long since disappeared and Queen’s promo films are not included), but there’s enough to make this the definitive DVD of a film that has truly stood the test of time. Jonathan Wilkins

VERDICT: 9/10
A prize worthy of the immortals – and you don’t need to decapitate anyone to get your hands on it!