Overkill

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CONAN THE BARBARIAN Directed by John Milius Screenplay by John Milius and Oliver Stone

That which does not kill us makes us I stronger." When a movie begins with G. Gordon Liddy's favorite quotation from Nietzsche, the suspicion arises that somebody may be taking the enterprise a trifle too seriously. That's especially so when we know the title character is not borrowed from anyone's list of the great books, but from Weird Tales, a pulp magazine of the 1930s, and owes his continued life to comic books and paperback originals. Nostalgia for creatures from the black lagoon of adolescent fantasy, even a certain wry affection, is permissible; the lugubrious sobriety John Milius brings to Conan the Barbarian is not.

His hero's traditional nemesis Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) is now guilty not just of killing Conan's parents and selling the boy into slavery, but of running a drug and snake cult for hippies. (At last we know where to locate Conan in time; this is the Stoned Age.) Seeking vengeance, Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) becomes, incidentally, the world's first deprogrammer. This among other muscle-bound links to contemporary life is definitely intentional. What is not is the flatness of Schwarzenegger's performance, the dullness of his odyssey. Instead of the giddy lift one sometimes obtains from improbably heroic adventures, one gets a grim endorsement of the uses of primitive mysticism and brutality. Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying. --By Richard Schickel

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