25 Years Later, The “Worst” Fantasy Movie Ever Suddenly Feels Fine

The Highlander franchise is the funniest franchise in all of science fiction and fantasy, simply for the fact that it battled its way into a corner in 1986, and then spent a decade and a half trying to cut its way out. The original film, starring Christopher Lambert as immortal swordsman Connor MacLeod, was a unique kind of cult classic, a film that predated the current romantasy craze, but nonetheless delivered a sprawling romance story fused with a kind of hard rock sensibility. Two sequels followed, in 1991 and in 1994, though each contradicted the other, and both contradicted the first film. At the end of the original adventure, Connor was the last immortal, but because that was no fun, Highlander continued to cherry-pick from its own canon in order to figure out how to keep making sequels. And by the year 2000, the franchise gave us a Hail Mary that, at the time, was considered to be not just bad, but according to one contemporary review, it was “The leading contender for worst film of the year.”

But, twenty-five years after its release on September 1, 2000, Highlander: Endgame doesn’t really deserve its embarrassing 11 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. In fact, if this kind of deft retcon were made in another franchise today, it would be celebrated. This isn’t to say that Endgame is somehow great, but instead, that it was a noble attempt then, and feels fresher today than you might remember. Mild spoilers ahead.

By the time Endgame hit theaters, the dominant version of Highlander within certain geek circles was no longer the films. Instead, the popular TV series, starring Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod — a clansman of Connor’s, though a century younger — had become, for all intents and purposes, the true Highlander. And, while Lambert had appeared in the pilot episode for the TV show in 1992, when someone thought of Highlander in 1999 or 2000, they almost always thought of Adrian Paul.

Endgame, then, was a valiant attempt to, once and for all, marry the continuities of the movie Highlander with the TV Highlander. As critics of the time have stated, this means the movie looks and feels more like an extended episode of the TV series than an actual film. But that characterization is both unfair and, in a twisted way, a compliment. If you saw the film in theaters in early autumn of 2000, and you were a hardcore fan, then you likely saw what director Doug Aarniokoski intended: a love letter to the franchise as a whole.

In order to really mix the TV series with the movie series, Endgame relies heavily on a lot of retroactive continuity that posits that Connor and Duncan have been buddies for several centuries. This means that Endgame brings back certain elements from the original film: Connor’s first wife, Heather (Beatie Edney), who passed away in Scotland in 1590, and his loyal companion Rachel (Sheila Gish), whom he rescued from the Nazis during WWII.

Considering that Edney and Lambert recreated various contexts from the original film, 14 years later, the effect is fairly convincing. Bringing back Rachel, a minor character from the original film, complete with Connor’s opulent and hidden New York loft, was also a nice touch. Though Endgame clearly has a smallish budget, Aarniokoski makes good use of it and convinces us that we’re in Scotland, New York City, and all sorts of other places with relative ease. (Star Trek fans will know Aarniokoski for his recent directorial work on Star Trek: Picard, which is equally impressive.)

The plot of Endgame rests on the idea that Connor has been stalked, all his life, by a bitter immortal named Jacob Kell, played with the correct amount of evil by Bruce Payne. For reasons that are never made quite clear, Kell has convinced a bunch of other immortals to form a gang and attack other immortals, which seems to break the rules of the Highlander mythos. Kell takes up a lot of space in the movie, but Payne is overshadowed by a young Donnie Yen, who plays Jin Ke, an immortal warrior who gets, easily, the best fight scene against Duncan in the movie. (Rogue One fans will see a preview of Yen’s badassery in 2016.)

On top of all of this, Endgame shoehorns a love story into the film in which Duncan married a woman named Kate (Lisa Barbuscia) in the distant past, only to discover she was a latent immortal. Duncan, wanting to be with Kate forever, “murders” her in order to trigger her immortality, making Duncan into a kind of lovesick vampiric character; he only wanted Kate to join him in eternity, but of course, didn’t give her the choice.

This slightly undercooked idea is backburnered a bit, mostly because the most important aspect of the film is the bromance between Connor and Duncan. It’s a passing-of-the-sword movie, which, in retrospect, probably should have happened about five years earlier, when the TV series was at the height of its popularity. Like two undercover Jedi, Connor decides he has to give all of his power to Duncan so Duncan can defeat Kell, which means Duncan has to take his friend’s head, the infamous way in which immortals can be made not immortal.

And so, years before Rey became “All the Jedi” in The Rise of Skywalker, Duncan absorbs all of Connor’s power, making him the most powerful immortal on Earth. If all of this sounds awesome, it’s sadly not. The bittersweet battle between Connor and Duncan is solid enough, but the payoff after that isn’t quite as interesting. The current streaming version of the movie is the so-called “producer’s cut,” which is a bit longer, and inexplicably reveals that Kate is alive, even though we really thought Kell axed her earlier in the movie.

Ultimately, Highlander: Endgame inherits the curse of all the other installments in the franchise; it has a problem with an actual ending. This is probably unintentionally ironic, but sort of a perfect problem for the franchise to have. The series is about people who live forever, and thus, also, don’t have ends to their lives, and the movie and TV shows are always undoing their endings, too.

But what comes before the limp ending isn’t so bad. In fact, the retcon of Highlander: Endgame feels closer to the don’t-worry-about-it approach that James Gunn has been doing with DC in Peacemaker Season 2. It’s a deft and fun way to tackle a complicated and confusing canon, and that’s because this technique centers characters over mythology. And, if you were then, or now, a fan of any aspect of the series, Endgame is a movie that wants you to like it.

Generally speaking, Highlander fans know that it’s a race to the bottom to determine the second-best or even third-best movie in the series. But, in 2025, Endgame feels refreshingly humble and more than a little bit charming. There should have only been one of these movies, but if we had to have sequels, this one, at least, had heart.

Highlander: Endgame is streaming on Pluto TV.