There’s a moment in Conan the Destroyer when you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t just playing a barbarian—he isthe barbarian. Not in some deep method-acting, Daniel Day-Lewis kind of way. No, this is different. He’s a walking slab of beef with a sword in one hand and a confused look stapled to his brow, like he just woke up in the middle of a LARP and forgot the safe word.
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).
Let me pause here to say something important: Olivia d’Abo steals this movie like a cat burglar at a nudist colony. She is the only actor in this whole mess who seems to understand she’s in a trashy fantasy adventure and decides to have some damn fun with it. She pouts. She teases. She sashays around like she owns the place. And whether she’s romancing a young thief or giving Chamberlain the side-eye, she’s more charismatic than both Arnold’s delts and Wilt’s 7’1″ frame put together.
Olivia d’Abo is the reason some people watched this movie, and the reason most people remember it. She was a teenager, yes, but she radiated the kind of mischievous charm that 1980s fantasy films were built on: innocent-looking but never innocent. Every scene with her feels like a schoolgirl running circles around her babysitters. If there’s a soul in this movie, it’s hidden somewhere in her smirk.
The rest of the cast? Oh boy.
There’s Mako, reprising his role as Akiro the wizard. He waves his hands, says vague mystical nonsense, and somehow keeps a straight face through it all. Then there’s Tracey Walter as Malak, the comic relief thief who was clearly invented by a screenwriter who thought, “What if we made Gollum but less useful?” He’s constantly bumbling, shrieking, or narrowly avoiding death, which makes him more annoying than funny—like your drunk uncle who thinks he’s a hit at family reunions but always ends up breaking a lamp.
Grace Jones plays Zula, a warrior woman who looks like she wandered in from the Mad Max set after losing a bet. Her performance is part kabuki theater, part aerobics instructor having a bad acid trip. She yells a lot and swings a stick like she’s trying to beat back tax season. She’s not bad per se—just completely out of sync with everyone else, like a cymbal crashing during a funeral.
And then there’s Wilt.
Wooden Wilt Chamberlain. He towers over everyone, sure, but so does a refrigerator, and I’d argue a fridge has more emotional range. His dialogue is so minimal you’d think he was being paid per word. His character arc? Stand tall, look menacing, then betray someone at the end like a malfunctioning Roomba with a mustache. He tries to fight Arnold in a climactic battle that feels more like a slow dance between two immovable objects. Think sumo wrestling without the speed.
The effects are laughable. At one point, a creature that looks like a cross between an angry lizard and a rejected Muppet attacks Conan in a hall of mirrors. The scene drags on forever, and you start wondering if the editor fell asleep or just really wanted to show off how many mirrors they could afford on set. Later, a resurrected God shows up looking like someone’s inflatable Halloween decoration. It was supposed to be terrifying. It ends up looking like it was filled with sulfur and spite.
Even the fight choreography feels neutered. Conan swings his sword like he’s trying not to pull a muscle. Blood is replaced with sparkles, and death blows are cut away faster than a nun at a strip show. For a movie called Conan the Destroyer, there’s very little destroying going on. Conan the Mildly Inconveniencer might have been a more accurate title.
And yet… there’s something here. Maybe it’s the unapologetic 80s kitsch. Maybe it’s the sheer absurdity of watching Grace Jones scream at Arnold while Olivia d’Abo twirls her hair in the background. Maybe it’s the unintentional comedy of seeing Conan, slayer of gods, forced into a buddy comedy with a wizard, a thief, and an NBA Hall of Famer. This isn’t a good film. It’s barely even a coherent one. But it’s got a kind of trashy charm, like a beer-stained paperback with a Frazetta cover and half the pages missing.
Conan the Destroyer is the cinematic equivalent of a microwaved burrito at 2 AM—it’ll leave you feeling bloated, regretful, but somehow vaguely satisfied in a guilty pleasure kind of way. Just don’t expect the poetry of Milius or the savagery of Howard.
But do expect Olivia d’Abo to outshine them all.
Even the barbarians.
