King Conan is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chance at a late-era masterpiece, like Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ | film

IIf you were a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 80s and 90s, his late-era career will likely be a huge letdown. The Austrian oak was once Hollywood’s most reliable tool for beating up killer robots, but it’s never had its unforgivable moment. Despite a string of absurdly influential sci-fi and fantasy films, Schwarzenegger missed the kind of late-career reckoning that could have dismantled his youthful legend, just as Clint Eastwood’s 1992 epic Western confronted the very myth the actor-director had spent decades building.

It’s not like Hollywood hasn’t tried it. In fact, studios have spent the last decade or so trying to reproduce Schwarzenegger’s “veteran” phase, as if prodding the action hero legend with a stick to see if it still roars. The problem is that nothing has quite landed. Terminator: Dark Fate turns the T-800 into a retired fabric salesman who reflects on his violent past. Maggie has made him a grieving father in a quiet zombie family drama. “Aftermath” is essentially a somber meditation on grief that briefly veers into revenge thriller territory. None of them managed to become the monument to the Schwarzenegger enigma that the actor’s era-defining body of work seemed to demand. If Arnold’s fans wanted the kind of late-career statement that turns an aging action star into a cinematic totem, they instead got an increasingly human-looking man who appears in mid-budget thrillers and looks somewhat anxious.

But King Conan can change all that. Reports this week suggest that the long-awaited third film in the Conan trilogy (if we can call it that) could finally see the light of day, more than three decades after the disappointingly devastating 1984 Conan film that sent Arnie and Grace Jones rampaging through the Hyborian Age. Mission: Impossible’s Christopher McQuarrie is committed to writing and directing. Arnie himself told the audience at the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio, that the film will finally explore what happens when the barbarian who has conquered everything discovers that his rule is a little more complicated. “It’s a great story,” he said. Arnie explains that after sitting on the throne for 40 years, “Conan is feeling complacent, and now he’s slowly being forced out of the kingdom.” Then there’s the conflict, of course, and then it comes back somehow, 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 a lot of money to make these movies really big.

King Conan isn’t the only project being planned that will see the 78-year-old Schwarzenegger return to the height of his glory. The actor also revealed that he’s been talking with director Dan Trachtenberg about returning to the Predator franchise, and that there are plans afoot to revive the character of Colonel John Matrix from the 1985 film Commando. The sword and sorcery trilogy may actually give Arnie the legacy he’s been waiting for, as the story is already present in the source material. Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories charted the barbarian’s entire life course from wandering thief and mercenary to the aging 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 will effectively play Max von Sydow from John Milius’s brilliant Conan the Barbarian (1982): a disillusioned elderly king (King Osric) who once lived the life of a sword-swinging barbarian hero, but now sits uncomfortably on a throne.

Schwarzenegger’s screen presence has never been subtle, and he probably doesn’t have Seydoux’s uncanny ability to turn over-baked fantasy lines into the Hyborian equivalent of Shakespeare. Milius’ Conan the Barbarian is great because Arnie, still very much learning his craft, lets almost everyone else do the talking. But wouldn’t it be great if he could really knock this one out of the park? Unforgiven deconstructs Eastwood’s carefully crafted gunslinger myth by forcing its aging outlaw hero to grapple with the violence that made him infamous. It turned decades of gunslinger mythology on its head. It wasn’t just another Western, it was the movie that explained the West. If King Conan can do the same for Arnie’s macho environment, it will go a long way in bringing Schwarzenegger’s career full circle. It may be Macquarie’s mission to convince viewers that the man who spent much of the 1980s beheading witches and slaughtering snake-worshipping charlatans is finally ready for a little introspection.