It's a strange fact that, despite its nostalgic name, Highlander is being billed as another action movie. Someone, somewhere, must have decided that Celts in kilts, even if they are Christopher Lambert, don't sell pictures.

In reality the film is a curious mixture of romance in 15th-century heather and car-chases in present-day New York. The unusual theme of a handful of immortals battling through the centuries to win a mythical 'prize', allowed the film-makers to juxtapose scenes from any pair of centuries they cared to imagine. The resultant cuts are sometimes elegant – from neon Japanese women on a hoarding to genuine Mona Lisa for example – but more often slightly untidy. Highlander was pruned in a fairly arbitrary fashion for US audiences and still looks as if it could lose or gain scenes without much loss to artistic form.

Pulling it together is the magnetic Lambert, whose screen glower is not diminished by his admission that in real liie he 'can't see a thing without my glasses'. The French-born actor, who starred in Greystoke and later in Subway, seems finally to have found a part to match his strange English accent. As the time-wandering Highlander, he comes from 'lots at different places', as he pointedly snubs a taunting New York cop.

Lambert handles the growth of the character well from impetuous clansman, Connor McLeod, through to the world-weary New York citizen of the first scene, in which he sits unimpressed through what looks like the US wrestling match to end all wrestling matches.

He is well matched by Clancy Brown as the evil Kurgan, clad in black leather jacket whatever the century and endowed with a wicked sense of humour, and by his two leading ladies, Roxanne Hart and Beatie Edney.

Edney, the daughter of Sylvia Sims, gives a luminous performance as his one and only wife, and despite the ludicrous theatricality of ageing makeup, manages to be quite touching in her deathbed scene with the ever young and virile Lambert. Sean Connery, mis-cast as an immortal Spanish nobleman with an accent more Scottish than Lambert's, is the weak link that threatens to turn the film's gentle humour into unintentional farce.

Highly enjoyable, this is a film worth seeing on several levels, notably for its action and romance, and the unusual dimension given to both by the theme of immortality. As Lambert lifts his sword to swipe the head from yet another deadly enemy, the comforting phrase 'It will be the same a hundred years hence', has never had more meaning.