So when I watched the first Conan movie, I complained about its episodic plot, how it involved Conan just wandering around and getting into little bits of stories that didn’t really fit together. Well, this movie fixes that: It’s got a straightforward narrative, a clear quest with a goal and all that, and… I now retract my complaint.

Because the problem is that if you take Conan and put him into a very conventional form, the result is just dull. I mean, it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s just kinda… there. It’s less weird, less distinctive, more of just a big Hollywood four-quadrant movie.

Its shift toward being a family-friendly blockbuster instead of a movie for fantasy weirdos is also clear in the level of sex in the movie. The first one was, as I said, borderline softcore porn; this one is nearly chaste. Yeah, fine, there’s some semi-revealing outfits, but like zero actual nudity. You can definitely feel that shift from the free-wheeling ’70s to the buckled-down Reagan years.

I don’t really want to say that this movie would be better if it were more of a hot mess like the first one; but what I’ll say is that the first one, for all its many flaws, was distinctively itself. This isn’t distinctively anything, and could be basically any ol’ generic ’80s fantasy movie, just with a barbarian slotted into the lead role.