Your Highness
- Year:2011
- Rating:MA
- Director:David Gordon Green
- Cast:Zooey Deschanel, James Franco, Danny McBride, Natalie Portman
- Release Date:May 12, 2011
- Distributor:Universal
- Running time:102 minutes
- Film Worth:$14.50
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
With the comedy proving uneven, this surprisingly works better as an epic adventure ride than a vulgar farce.
If you've ever wanted to see armoured knights muttering the f-bomb, Natalie Portman wielding a longbow, or a perverse, pot-smoking purple Muppet, then this is your movie. Like The Princess Bride on acid, Your Highness is a spectacular fantasy adventure-comedy that unexpectedly works better as a straight adventure film than as a vulgar farce.
This is in part because the jokes are so hit and miss. Apparently star Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green feel that cursing is in and of itself funny, forgetting the need to actually write jokes around the swearing. It works at the beginning, and a glowering Justin Theroux as the evil sorcerer Leezar has the best of it, but it quickly begins to wear.
Thankfully, things are enlivened when Natalie Portman shows up, giving her V For Vendetta English accent a more thorough whirl as a vengeful assassin. She joins up with McBride and James Franco - the most improbable of brothers - on their quest to rescue the princess Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) from Leezar's clutches.
McBride (Pineapple Express and the TV series, Eastbound & Down) plays the slacker of the two, the deadbeat Thadeous, who's more at home curled up in a castle with wenches and wizard weed than his heroic brother, Prince Fabious. The film becomes a coming-of-age tale about the unloved, oafish sibling discovering that he's not such an ineffectual klutz after all.
Were it not for the crude humour, it would be easy to confuse the film with an actual epic - the Northern Ireland vistas are stunning, and the sets, costumes and special effects are first rate. Particularly impressive is the combination of CGI, puppetry and the old-fashioned, tangible charm of seeing a man in a ten-foot Minotaur suit. The action, too, is clear and exciting, which makes it easier to overlook the unevenness of its comedy.
