Conan the Barbarian: Critic Reviews

Here's a movie that's simultaneously lavishly violent and numbing, visually ornate and undistinguished, epic and shallow, relentlessly noisy and tone-deaf, workmanlike and unfilling.

Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling.

Here is a tale in which battle sequence spawns battle sequence and where the dialogue is rendered all-but unintelligible under the din of clashing steel and the screams of the mutilated.

Conan the Barbarian lives by a pretty simple ethos: He lives, he loves, he slays. What he doesn't do, alas, is act.

Momoa ... speaks in one of those trying-too-hard baritones heard in young jocks whose greatest fear is being called gay.

Even the Schwarzenegger version had a crackpot long-range vision. This Conan is just a barbarian for hire.

Both truer to the vision of its character's creator, Robert E. Howard, and more satisfyingly pulpy than the 1982 movie incarnation.

It's just another ham-handed adventure flick in eye-deadening, wallet-draining 3-D.

Dull and uninvolving, Conan the Barbarian occasionally verges on escaping its rut, but never makes good on the promise. It's busy without having energy, a loud, lackluster mess.

A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.

I've certainly seen worse movies this summer, though I hope that if director Nispel returns to the land of Hyboria he'll learn that sword fights don't respond well to his chaotic brand of staging, made worse by the editing.

At its best the movie suggests a funhouse at a state-of-the-art county fair; at its worst it's a fairly dumb celebration of brute violence.

There's just not a lot to like here, with the exception of what may be one of the all-time best bad movie lines, one Conan utters to Tamara as a kind of personal credo: "I live. I love. I slay. I am content." That makes one of us.

With all earnestness, Nispel embraces the property's classic roots, placing this new Conan squarely within the tradition of sword-and-sorcery pics.

You can't underestimate the vitality of a movie where manly men give orders such as, "We will cast our rivals into oceans of blood."

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

The very definition of the dumb summer flick, designed to squeeze a few last bucks out of the kids before school starts up again.

Shoddy acting, no real plot, and silly dialogue? You betcha!

It ain't a pretty sight -- in fact, it's downright barbaric.

The 2011 version of Conan the Barbarian looks cheap and feels rushed. The few good elements are dwarfed by a generic, nonsensical plot and shoddy storytelling.

Non-stop blood-and-guts action aimed at game boys and emotionally stunted lovers of adolescent fantasy.

It didn't seem possible for there to be even less characterization than there was in the original "Conan," but voila.

A gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.

It's kind of a wicked blast to watch, especially if you're in the mood for some righteous revenge.

Conan the Barbarian isn't offensively bad, just mediocre and forgettable in nearly every way imaginable.