Army of Darkness — Three Words He Couldn’t Learn

The chosen one is the problem, and he brought a shotgun.

Three words. That is the whole assignment. To lift the Necronomicon without waking anything underneath it, Ash has to say klaatu, barada, nikto, and the movie watches him rehearse on the walk to the graveyard the way a kid crams in the elevator before a final. He nails the first two. He blanks on the third. And then, because admitting he forgot would sting for maybe four seconds, he covers the hole with a cough and a confident nod and reaches for the book anyway. The dead hear it. All of them. Every skeleton that claws up through the soil for the rest of the picture, every flaming catapult stone, every terrified villager huddled behind a castle wall, traces back to one man deciding that looking sure of himself mattered more than being right. It is the funniest inciting incident of the decade, and the meanest, because after two movies of demons and cellars, the trilogy has finally found its true villain, and he is standing there wearing the hero’s chin.

Army of Darkness closes out a clean three-part study of what Sam Raimi thinks a protagonist is for. The first film made Ash a victim. The second made him a punching bag. The third flings him back to 1300 AD with a chainsaw, a shotgun, and an Oldsmobile, and makes him something richer and more damning: an idiot abroad. Bruce Campbell plays him as the ugly American in chain mail, talking down to a medieval world he considers beneath him while flunking nearly everything it asks of him. He calls the locals primitives. He mangles their customs. He struts through their castle handing out catchphrases the way a minor celebrity signs autographs at a store opening, generous with everything except attention. The film gives him the complete hero kit, prophecy and boomstick and destiny, and then spends ninety minutes proving that equipment is not character. He carries the twentieth century’s tools and none of its supposed enlightenment, and the movie’s steadiest joke is that a Sears sporting-goods aisle cannot fill a hollow man.

Raimi’s cruelty used to work by confinement. Now it works by multiplication. The windmill sequence splits Ash into a swarm of tiny tormentors, mini-Ashes going at him with forks and trip wires in a stretch of pure live-action Looney Tunes, and then the gag deepens. One of the little ones grows into Bad Ash, a full evil double, and the movie is careful about what he is. He is not an invading spirit. He is a distillation, everything smug and lazy and self-serving in the man poured into its own body and given better posture. Good, bad, I’m the guy with the gun is a tremendous line, and the film means it as an indictment: the gun is the entire moral distinction on offer. Holding all of this together is craft offered as a love letter in old money. The skeleton army marches in open homage to the Harryhausen warriors of Jason and the Argonauts, stop-motion soldiers clattering in ranks, deliberately handmade in 1992, the very year the industry started sprinting toward digital. Raimi builds his climax out of the toybox of his childhood and cuts it with the timing of a musical.

Then there is the ending. Or rather, both of them. In the version Raimi shot, Ash receives a potion and exact instructions for sleeping his way home to his own century, miscounts the drops, and wakes into a ruined future, having slept straight through the apocalypse. That is the trilogy’s perfect period: after everything, the man’s carelessness cancels his survival, one last exam failed like all the others. The studio balked, and the theatrical cut ends at the S-Mart housewares counter instead, Ash blasting a Deadite and getting the girl, failure gift-wrapped as a victory lap. The swap diminishes the film without betraying it, because even the sunny ending is a joke at his expense. There he is, home at last, in the only kingdom he ever really wanted, shelving product and narrating his own legend to coworkers who could not care less.

Say the shortfall plainly, because it is real. This is the slightest of the three films. Chasing a wider audience, it drains the horror out entirely, thinning its blood to a PG-13 temperature the earlier pictures would have spat across the room. The middle stretch between the pit and the graveyard sags under plot management. And Sheila is less a character than a prize with dialogue, a step backward even from Linda’s slim part. The trilogy’s stakes were always personal, one man and whatever the darkness wanted from him, and here they go abstract, an army against a castle, and abstraction is the one thing Raimi’s intimate cruelty was never built to carry.

What survives the thinning is the idea, and the idea holds. Here is a fantasy epic built on the claim that the chosen one is the problem. Every franchise hero since who fails upward behind a smirk owes something to this movie’s math, and almost none of them are honest about the arithmetic. Raimi is. He hands his fool the win, the girl, and the catchphrase, and lets the seams show on all three, so the triumph plays like a man accepting a medal for surviving a fire he started. Hail to the king, sure. Just check his count on the drops.