Just watched “The Conqueror” again, and now my brain hurts! Don’t get me wrong; as I said in a past post about the movie, I don’t think its Duke’s worst movie. The action scenes are good, and there’s… There’s… Well, the action scenes are good!
I liked the movie, when I watched it before, but for all the wrong reasons; for the same reasons I enjoyed Duke as a singing cowboy in some of those B movies, or for the same reasons I have enjoyed Japanese giant monster movies…for the novelty of it! But like those Japanese monster movies, the novelty kind of goes away with a second viewing!
The dialog in the movie is bad, but that’s the one thing that annoys me in most ‘sand and sword’ movies. Whether the characters are Asian, African, European or whatever, there’s always that overdramatic pseudo-Shakespearian way of delivering the lines that gets old real fast!
To sum it up, it had good action scenes, but even with that, it was hard to keep my mind on the movie! (For instance when I saw John Wayne as Genghis Kahn I kept thinking of those old “Looney Tunes” where Yosemite Sam would pop up as a knight or pirate or the like!)
John Wayne is my hero, my favorite actor and the star of many of my all-time favorite movies…but this ain’t one of ‘em!
