20 Movies - Highlander

When Russell Nash kills a man in a sword fight in a New York City parking lot, he accidentally leaves behind a sliver of his own ancient weapon. This leads Brenda Wyatt, a brilliant forensics specialist, to Nash, landing her in the middle of a war waged by a secret race of mystical immortals living amongst us, all of them vying to be the only one left, so that they can then claim their mysterious Prize.

So, while we wait for America, that rough beast, its hour come round at last, to slouch on towards Bethlehem to be born, its demise destined to change this world for the worst, perhaps forever… I'm still posting about my 20 most influential movies. 

As I’m sure you all know by know, as this film is Number 17 on my list, this series came about as a result of a social media game. The idea was to list 20 movies that greatly influenced you, then post a poster of each movie, one per day, for 20 days, but with no reviews, no explanations, just the posters. So I did that, but then I decided that I also wanted to talk about them a little bit...

So I have been.

1985, New York City.

A man named Russel Nash leaves a pro-wrestling match at Madison Square Garden early. But once he reaches the parking garage, he is confronted by a man named Iman Faisal. Faisal is an old enemy, a man who knows Russel Nash by his true name… Connor MacLeod.

The two draw their swords.

The duel finally ends when Connor beheads Faisal, and then says aloud, “There can be only one.” This triggers a raging storm of powerful energy that pulls the ghostly essence from Faisal’s body and whirls it about, with Connor at its center, absorbing it all, helpless within the agony and the ecstasy. The cars around him are destroyed in the lightning-like lashings of power.

This is The Quickening.

When it is over, Connor picks himself up from the parking garage floor, hides his sword in the garage's ceiling, and flees the scene in his car, only to be detained as NYPD officers arrive to investigate. The cops are ultimately forced to release the man known as Russel Nash due to a lack of evidence, but they don’t like it.

Connor's real history is then revealed through a series of flashbacks.

It begins in the Scottish Highlands in 1536. Here we see Connor of the Clan MacLeod as a young warrior standing with his people on the field of battle across from their hated rivals, the Fraser clan. But there is a mysterious foreign warrior known as the Kurgan who aids the Frasers in this battle, and all he has asked for is the right to slay young Connor.

During the battle, Connor is confused. The fight rages all around him, but none of the Fraser Clan will actually fight him. Then he finds himself in the middle of the fray, facing the Kurgan alone. The dark warrior fatally stabs him, but is driven off by Connor’s clansman before he can behead the young warrior.

Suddenly, Connor wakes amongst the dead of his kin. His wounds have healed like they never existed. In the Clan Hall, his friends and family are terrified to see that he is upright and talking and flush with life. They accuse him of witchcraft. The clan wants to kill him, but his chieftain mercifully exiles him. Eventually, Connor finds a new life, far off, in a new town. He works there as a blacksmith, and he has married a woman named Heather MacDonald.

And then one day a fanciful Spanish swordsman named Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez finds Connor. Born Tak-Ne, in the year 896 BC in Ancient Egypt, he was driven from his home after having been run down in the streets, crushed by an out of control cart, only to recover from fatal wounds. Ramirez has wandered the Earth ever since. Currently, he is the Chief Metallurgist to King Charles V, but he has left his post, and has been tracking the Kurgan to Scotland. He carries a Dragonshead Katana forged by Masamune himself, the man widely considered to be Japan’s greatest swordsmith.

Ramírez decides to stay and to train Connor, explaining that he, Connor, the Kurgan, and many others like them, were born immortals. That they are destined to battle each other forever–save for when they are on holy ground–until only one of them remains, and on that day, that one will claim the Prize.

Ramirez means to ensure that the Kurgen never claims this Prize.

There are three central ideas that govern the life of the Immortals… The Quickening, The Gathering, and The Prize.

The Quickening is a pull that draws the Immortals together. It is the tingling feeling that Immortals experience when in the presence of another. It is also the raging storm that transfers the power and strength of one Immortal to the other, after that Immortal has been beheaded in a duel. Each beheading is one more step toward The Time of The Gathering, the prophesied final meeting of the last two Immortals. It is said that this will happen in a far off land, and here, the Immortals will fight for The Prize. The Prize is what will be won by the last remaining Immortal after they have beheaded their final opponent. The Prize is a mysterious thing, but it is thought to be a connection to all living things, the power to remake the world into that whatever the bearer of the Prize wishes it to be. And it is this end goal that forms the central belief of all of the Immortals, their credo, and their guiding light.

"There can be only one."

Ramírez reveals to Connor that immortals cannot have children, and that they should avoid making relationships with mortal humans, as they will only be forced to watch them die. He urges Connor to leave Heather now, rather then at her inevitable end.

One night, while Connor is away, the Kurgan finds Connor's home, where Ramirez and Heather await Connor's return. The Kurgen duels Ramirez and in the end, he wins, decapitating Ramirez. He then assaults Heather and leaves her alive. Years later, after Heather dies of old age, Connor swears to never to love again, and he leaves Scotland to wander the Earth, adopting Ramírez's katana as his own.

Back in 1985 New York City, the time of The Gathering approaches.

The Kurgan arrives in the city, as do other Immortals, where Connor now lives as Russel Nash, an quiet and unassuming antiques dealer, with his adopted daughter, a woman he once saved from the Nazis as a child, Rachel Ellenstein.

Meanwhile, Brenda Wyatt—an expert in metallurgy and sword-making—who works for the NYPD as a forensic scientist, finds a shard from Connor's sword embedded in the concrete of the parking garage, and is puzzled at how such an ancient Japanese sword came to be involved. Suspicious, and following Connor, she witnesses him fight the Kurgen in a duel, and sees Connor nearly cut off the Kurgen’s head with a katana before they are separated by the arrival of the police. She later meets with Connor, hoping to learn more about him, his sword, and the strange duel she witnessed, but while Connor likes her, he tells her that it would be best for her to leave him alone.

Meanwhile, the Kurgan duels and beheads an Immortal named Sunda Kastagir, but he leaves a witness who describes the killer to the police, and now the NYPD is looking for a giant leather-clad monster man with a huge sword. Brenda is still busy investigating Connor, and uncovers evidence that he has lived for centuries. Then it’s Heather's birthday, and Connor is lighting a candle for her in a church, as he has done every year, when the Kurgan shows up, staples on his neck holding his nearly-severed head to his body, and confirms that he and Connor are the last remaining immortals.

Sooner rather than later, the pair will meet in battle.

Brenda confronts Connor, who explains his true identity. Connor then “shows her his sword” and they spend a "slow smooth saxaphone" kind of night together.

The Kurgan finds out about Brenda and he kidnaps her in order to draw Connor out. Knowing this is it, he says goodbye to Rachel, and goes to confront the Kurgan once last time, winner take the Prize. After a protracted duel, Connor decapitates the Kurgan, which triggers a final Quickening to end all Quickenings, as at long last, after these centuries…

There is now only one.

Having claimed the Prize, Connor returns to Scotland with Brenda and reveals to her that he is now a mortal man who can age and have children. Also he is able to read the thoughts and feelings of people all around the world, and he hopes to use his new found power to bring peace to humanity.

Gregory Widen apparently originally wrote the script for Highlander as a class assignment while an undergraduate in the screenwriting program at UCLA. At the time, it was called Shadow Clan, and it was inspired in part by Ridley Scott's 1977 film The Duellists, a kind of riff on the idea of a pair of guys wanting to fight each other in a duel over the years, and also a trip that Widen took the UK. There, after he toured the armor display at the Tower of London, he mused on the question of “What if this was all mine, and I had owned and worn and used it all throughout the centuries, and now it was hanging in my house?” That’s a bit of paraphrasing, of course, but you can see where the idea came from, and how it eventually became the story of Immortals engaged in a centuries-long series of duels, one governed by very strict rules and traditions, all while they lead these incredibly long secret lives that we mortals are blissfully unaware of.

I love that.

I love the idea of hidden worlds right around the corner.

The movie touches on several potentially interesting questions too. Like, how might centuries of constant loss and violence affect a person? Or, when your only long-term relationships involve other Immortals, would you be able to kill them simply because the central tents of your existence demand it? Or the classic “you were once mortal but you are now an immortal” question… would you be able to abandon your loved ones knowing that to do otherwise will only mean watching them slowly age and die, while you yourself remain unchanged?

Now, obviously, if you've seen the movie, the film isn’t all that interested in exploring any of these questions too deeply, but still, it certainly suggests a lot of potentially fertile narrative ground contained within the material.

I loved that too.

When I first heard about the movie Highlander, way back in the day, I couldn’t believe that an idea as cool as this could possibly exist. I had to see it. In a world before comic book movies that actually adapted the source material in the right way existed, this movie sounded like exactly what I wanted to see. And when I saw it, I loved it immediately. But more than that, much like Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or The Road Warrior, or Dawn of the Dead, the entire idea of the film, and the myriad possibilities that its world could contain, set my mind on fire. Sure, sure, this film takes place at the far end of the tale of the Immortals and their great contest, and we only get a small glimpse of their world, but still, the stories that could potentially take place in this world seemed endless to me, the whole root idea of a secret world of Immortals amongst us seemed ripe to be spun off into so many other settings too.

It was all-around really exciting.

But that said, most people completely disagreed with me.

Upon its original theatrical release, Highlander only grossed around $2.4 million domestically on its opening weekend, and ended with $5.9 million in the United States and Canada. Internationally, it only grossed around $12.9 million. Even in 1986, this means that the film was… um… not well received. Still, it found a second life on home video, and on the midnight movie cult circuit, which was so strong, it kept the franchise alive for years, decades even, and spawned multiple sequels and a multi-season tv show. Not only that, but after Marillion, Bowie, Sting, and Duran Duran all passed, the film ended up with an amazing soundtrack by Queen, which makes any movie better. After all, that’s the entire reason why Rami Malek won an Oscar, and it's also at least half of the reason why people still love the Flash Gordon movie.

Also, that katana is so awesome. It’s so awesome, in fact, I think it's basically the entire reason for the whole era of fictional characters with katanas and trenchcoats that we still haven't fully shaken.

Highlander isn’t a perfect film, of course.

It’s a bit muddled, and there’s more than a bit of scenery-chewing. It’s definitely got a little ham-handed acting, sure, and it’s one of those movies that really gives the impression that there was a heavier hand in the editing suite than there should have been, but still, it’s got life to it. It’s unafraid to be weird and larger-than-life, and placing its classic fantasy swords and magic world into the middle of modern day NYC is so cool. Plus, something about the switch from those rain-soaked, noir-ish streets of New York City in the 1980s, to the windswept highlands of medieval Scotland, just works.

Also, Clancy Brown as the Kurgen is an all-time villain performance. Absolutely iconic. And the armor he wears in medieval Scotland is so fucking metal. You can't do it better than that. I also love the fact that Sean Connery appears in this film, a true Scotsman, and all of his scenes in the movie are shot in Scotland, and yet… he is playing an Egyptian… with a Scottish accent, because he just doesn't get a fuck. An immortal Egyptian Swordsman, or a Russian submarine captain, you're paying for Sean Connery, you get Sean Connery.

Highlander is an all-around fun and weird (and also bad) good time, thats a lot better than you’d expect. It simply has no equal when it comes to 80s sword and sorcery flicks. I don’t know how any card-carrying nerd couldn’t love this film.

As proof of how good it is, as proof of how much potential its ideas have... as I already mentioned, the first film was followed by two direct sequels, a spin-off tv show, and three in-direct sequel.

Highlander II: The Quickening was released in 1991, and it is so incredibly bad, and everything about it is so weird, so out-of-left field, so inexplicable, that it calls to you to watch it again and again, almost as if maybe this time it won’t be so weird and terrible. It's a cinematic siren, its strange song enticing you to come back and gaze upon its terrible strangeness one more time, come back and smash yourself upon its awful rocks again and again. It's a film that has a central narrative twist that is so strange and awful, you can feel the desperation in the Production Offices as they racked their brains with the question of “How do we make a sequel after the way the first film ended?” And the horror when they realized there was no good option, so they simply accepted the worst of a bad lot. It's so bad. Once you watch it, you will understand how it is that Highlander II: The Quickening is considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made. You will understand, but you will also kind of love it.

I mean, the sheer audacity of its terribleness...

But then Highlander III: The Final Dimension (also known as Highlander: The Sorcerer) came along in 1994, and apparently, this film took the general quality of Highlander II as some sort of challenge. And while on one hand, it does erase the entire story of Highlander II from the official canon, it replaces that story with one that is somehow not only much worse, but also much, much more dull.

After that, there was Highlander: The Series, which was a TV show that ran for six seasons from 1992 to 1997. It featured Duncan MacCleod, who I think was maybe Connor’s cousin, played by a man who was much more “TV handsome” than our hero Christopher Lambert, but he also openly wore a tiny ponytail, and that shit, along with the man-bun, or white guys with topknots, or worse, a white person with dreads, is inex-fucking-cusable, people. Otherwise, the tv show itself was… fine, but only in the way that super-nerds can truly tolerate. Think of it like the TV show version of the Alien Nation film, but not as good. Simply put, it is definitely not a thing that Nerds should ever recommend that a Casual check out, you simply have to be a fan of the franchise with a very high tolerance in order to enjoy it.

So, yeah… it was fine.

After that, the next couple of films were Highlander: Endgame in 2000, and then Highlander: The Source in 2007. They followed the continuity of the TV show, and they are both considered to be awful, but in a boring and unremarkable way.

The final entry into this honestly shockingly long-lived franchise–especially when you consider the fact that it only had one actually good film–was an animated film from 2007, Highlander: The Search for Vengeance. I don’t know if it was any good or not, because even super fans have their limits, but I’m willing to go out on a limb here and suggest that it was probably pretty bad. What I do know is that this film existed in a separate continuity, and featured a protagonist named Colin MacLeod, who I assume is yet another cousin of Connor MacLeod.

And you’d think that’d be the end of it, right?

You'd be wrong. Because apparently, much like the title character, this franchise is immortal and can only be killed by cutting its head off.

Summit Entertainment announced in 2008 it had purchased the film rights to Highlander, with plans to reboot the original movie for the modern day. Kevin McKidd was offered the role of Connor Macleod, as was Kit Harington, so was James MacAvoy, Stephen Amell, Robert Pattinson, and Charlie Hunnam. Ryan Reynolds was inexplicably cast in 2012 but thankfully dropped out, because in a terrible cornicopia of bad, wrong, and/or boring ideas, this was maybe the worst one of all. Then, in May 2021, Henry Cavill was announced as MacLeod. Michael Fassbender was rumoured to be The Kurgen, which was an interesting choice. But then, in June 2025, Russell Crowe was announced as Ramirez, Dave Bautista was cast as The Kurgan, and Karen Gillan was cast as Heather MacLeod, like some kind of awful Nerd Fan-casting Mad Libs, with filming reported to begin in early 2026 for a possible 2027/2028 release. Chad Stahelski, who was the director on the first John Wick, was announced as the director of the reboot, with his vision described as “John Wick... but with swords” because why not return to the one well where you found your only success.

Personally, I’d bet that this reboot never happens. Also, I sincerely hope it doesn't. The simple fact of the matter is, the first Highlander was lightning in a bottle, and the only thing all these sequels and spin-offs and attempted reboots have ever shown us as they've tried and failed to recapture that magic is this…

In the end, there can be only one.