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If you’re a fan of 1980s and 1990s Arnold Schwarzenegger, his late-era career has probably come as a bit of a disappointment. The Austrian oak was once Hollywood’s most reliable tool for punching killer robots, but he’s never really had his Unforgiven moment. Despite an absurdly influential run of sci-fi and fantasy movies, Schwarzenegger has missed out on the sort of grizzled, late-career reckoning that might have deconstructed his own youthful myth, just as Clint Eastwood’s epic 1992 western confronted the very legend the actor-director spent decades building.
It’s not as if Hollywood hasn’t tried. In fact, studios have spent the last decade or so trying to produce Schwarzenegger’s “old warrior” phase, as if prodding the action hero myth with a stick to see if it still roars. The problem is, nothing has quite landed. Terminator: Dark Fate turned the T-800 into a retired drapery salesman reflecting on his own violent past. Maggie had him as a grieving father in a quiet zombie family drama. Aftermath is essentially a sombre meditation on grief that briefly veers into revenge thriller territory. None quite managed to become the monument to the Schwarzenegger enigma that the actor’s era-defining body of work seemed to demand. If Arnold fans wanted the sort of late-career statement that turns an ageing action star into a cinematic totem, they instead got an increasingly mortal-looking man who turns up in mid-budget streaming thrillers looking faintly concerned.
But King Conan could change all that. Reports this week suggest that the long-gestating third film in the Conan trilogy (if we can call it that) could finally see the light of day, more than three decades after 1984’s disappointing Conan the Destroyer sent Arnie and Grace Jones rampaging across the Hyborian age. Mission: Impossible stalwart Christopher McQuarrie is attached to write and direct. Arnie himself told an audience at the Arnold Sports festival in Columbus, Ohio, that the film would finally explore what happens when the barbarian who conquered everything discovers that ruling it is rather more complicated. “It’s a great story,” he said. After sitting on the throne for 40 years, “Conan gets complacent, and now he gets forced out of the kingdom, slowly”, Arnie explains. Then there’s conflict, of course, and then he somehow comes back, and then there’s all kinds of madness and violence and magic and creatures. Now, of course, you have all the special effects, and the studio system has plenty of money to make those movies really big.”
King Conan isn’t the only project being planned that will see the 78-year-old Schwarzenegger revisiting his heyday. The actor also revealed that he has been talking to director Dan Trachtenberg about returning to the Predator franchise, and there are even plans afoot to revive the character of Colonel John Matrix from 1985’s Commando. The sword and sorcery threequel may actually give Arnie the legacy reckoning he’s been waiting for, because the story already exists in the source material. Robert E Howard’s original Conan stories charted the barbarian’s entire life arc from wandering thief and mercenary to the ageing king of Aquilonia, a ruler who conquered a kingdom in his youth and had to spend his final days trying to hold on to it. Schwarzenegger would effectively be playing the Max von Sydow part from John Milius’s splendid Conan the Barbarian (1982): an ageing, disenchanted monarch (King Osric) who once lived the life of a sword-swinging barbarian hero, but now sits uneasily on the throne.
Schwarzenegger’s screen presence was never subtle, and he probably doesn’t have Sydow’s uncanny ability to transform wildly overripe fantasy lines into the Hyborian equivalent of Shakespeare. Milius’s Conan the Barbarian is superb because Arnie, then still very much learning his trade, lets pretty much everybody else do the talking. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he really could knock this one out of the park? Unforgiven dismantled Eastwood’s carefully constructed gunslinger legend by forcing its ageing outlaw antihero to reckon with the violence that made him infamous. It turned decades of gunslinger mythology inside out. It wasn’t just another western – it was the film that explained the westerns. If King Conan could do the same for Arnie’s macho milieu, it would go some way to bringing Schwarzenegger’s career full circle. McQuarrie’s task could be to persuade audiences that a man who spent most of the 1980s decapitating witches and slaughtering serpent-worshipping warlocks is finally ready for a little introspection.
