'Conan the Barbarian': Remake Compared To 'Direct-To-DVD' Movie

Uh-oh. The first shots have been fired across the bow at "Conan the Barbarian" and they send a pretty blunt message: seeing this movie makes the ol' Wheel of Pain look tempting.

UK outlet The Playlist landed the remake's first review. Though it's entirely negative, there's good news: when a reviewer accuses you of not even trying to make a good movie, there's a chance the following reviews might not get worse than that.

"There are been plenty of bad movies this year, but at least you feel that people were trying for, say, 'Battle: Los Angeles' or 'Sucker Punch,' they didn't actually set out to make a bad movie," the review reads. But it goes even further to make the distinction. It calls the Jason Momoa-led sword-and-sandals epic "half-assed . . . a quick, cheap cash-grab with nothing but contempt for its audience."

It goes on to say that this "Conan" would even look awful stacked up next to some direct-to-DVD titles.

"And you should stay away from it like it was a horde of bandits coming to burn down your village," the scathing write-up reads.

Yikes. Certain things about this project did point to failure from the get-go.

For starters, since the 1984 original Arnold Schwarzenegger cult classic, no less than Brett Ratner, Robert Rodriguez and the Wachowski Brothers rose to the challenge of remaking it and every single one fell. If the minds respectively behind "Rush Hour," "Red Dragon," The Mexico Trilogy, "Sin City" and the "Matrix" trilogy couldn't make good on this, then Marcus Nispel - he of the "Friday the 13th" remake that I don't want to acknowledge exists, let alone that I actually watched it - never stood a chance.

Never, even with Morgan Freeman, Ron Perlman and "Game of Thrones" brute Momoa on board.

Poor Perlman, by the way. For all his strengths and great moments as a performer, when a review describes you as looking like "an extra from 'Battlefield Earth'," much like how producers must be seeing this review, you must think that low points can't get lower than this.

The review said that the entire movie is down-hill after a good opening sequence that depicts Conan's battlefield birth.

"We’d had some hope after (Momoa's) turn on 'Game of Thrones' that the actor might at least stand out in the film, forgetting that he only spoke half-a-dozen words of English across ten episodes," the reviewer wrote. "He’s fine at the sword-slinging, but delivery of dialogue? Not so much. And the rest of the cast aren’t much better: (Stephen) Lang is on sneering villainous autopilot, reprising his 'Avatar' turn with an unplaceable accent, while Rachel Nichols fails to give any personality to what is, in fairness, a role that’s not so much underwritten as never-written. Worst of all is Rose McGowan, made up to look like a cross between Christina Ricci and an IMAX screen, and horrendously overplaying her part as Lang’s sorceress daughter."

Still, give the reviewer this: at least the expectations seemed in check.

"But it’s not like you go to a 'Conan' movie for the acting: you go to watch some heads being cleaved," the review reads. "Even there it falls short, however. It’s not like there’s a lack of action—indeed, the film has little else, moving from battle to sword fight to battle to fight to battle to stagecoach chase to another sodding battle almost continuously, with little room to breathe in between, with the end result being that you never care, because the stakes are never particularly high, and the wall to wall violence means that the pace feels glacial."