Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994)

Highlander III: The Sorcerer arrives from 1994 with the confidence of a franchise that has decided to pretend its predecessor never happened. Connor MacLeod, an immortal Scotsman with a long memory and a longer sword, is drawn from his retirement in Marrakesh when an entombed sorcerer named Kane escapes and begins decapitating his way toward the Prize. The film moves from sixteenth-century Japan to Revolutionary France to a New York City power plant, and it does so without pausing to examine any of it. This is a movie about swords, and it knows it.

On the matter of casting, the ensemble is diverse in the unselfconscious manner of mid-1990s action cinema. Mario Van Peebles, Mako, and Daniel Dõ appear in substantial roles, and the film treats their presence as nothing more than casting. That is not a complaint. No racial themes are raised, no commentary is offered, and the narrative proceeds as though ethnicity were simply a fact of the world. Deborah Kara Unger plays Dr. Alexandra Johnson, an archaeologist with a trowel and a doctorate, who spends the back half of the film as a love interest and a plot mechanism. The doctorate is real. The agency is not.

The film lectures no one. There is no environmental sermon, no economic critique, no meditation on identity, no instruction on how we ought to live. Kane wants world domination. Connor wants to stop him and then retire to Scotland. The moral universe is a straight line, and the movie walks it with the grim determination of a man who has forgotten why he started. For a viewer in search of contemporary social instruction, this offers nothing. For a viewer in search of a man in a trench coat fighting a sorcerer in an abandoned power plant, it delivers precisely that.