Gory remakes of marginal quality are something of a specialty for German-born director Marcus Nispel, who counts the 2003 redo of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and 2009's "Friday the 13th" among his artier achievements. Though it's relative, the director keeps getting better each time out. Nispel has always brought a very strong vision to his work -- a sort of melodrama of imagery that can be mesmerizing if you can get past the viscera. Character development? Not so much.
In "Conan," he's got a better cast that he occasionally does better things with. Momoa is coming off a very fine run as the enigmatic horse-warrior Khal Drago in HBO's "Game of Thrones." He's got Conan firmly in his muscly grip, from the absurd asides, to the furrowed brow, to the fierce fighting, though some of the clunkier dialogue trips him and everyone else up. Momoa's also got that bigger-than-life presence that is absolutely necessary for this genre piece, enough to loosen the iconic hold that Arnold Schwarzenegger has had on Conan since he flexed those famous pecs in the 1982 original.
The movie itself does not attempt to replicate the Schwarzenegger version, which had less violence and a splash more cheesy humor. Instead writers Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood work off of Robert E. Howard's Conan mythology (he started it all with his dark pulp series on Conan in the early '30s) to create a troubled ancient world of warring tribes, vestal virgins, lethal swords and Machiavellian monsters.
After some setup voice-over to give a little historical context and introduce the Mask of Acheron, which is the holy grail here, we are in the midst of a bloody battle with the Cimmerians led by Conan's father Corin (Ron Perlman rocking a Unabomber beard), lopping off heads left and right. Conan's mother (Laila Rouass) is in the middle of the fray, and labor, delivering Conan by C-section, which apparently wasn't as much a routine procedure as it is now.
Flash-forward to a motherless Conan (oh, come on, anyone could figure that out), at about 13, played by very tough young martial arts expert Leo Howard, who gets perhaps the best action sequence in the movie. It's one of those rite of passage things that always go bad, and it involves a lot of running in rough terrain, some wonderfully choreographed fighting and surviving. The fight scenes throughout are stunning to look at, exceptionally gross, exploit the 3-D technology in the best possible way and should satisfy hard-core action junkies, though there are still way too many of them.
