Dir.David Gordon Green,USA,102mins,2011
Cast:Danny McBride,James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Once Upon A Time (the most clichéd way this review could have started, no?) medieval comedies were a place of unrivalled courtyard chortling; Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Princess Bride are the examples commonly wheeled out and placed upon the plinth. Following on from their bloated excess of yore, also known as Pineapple Express, director/star combination of David Gordon Green, Danny McBride and James Franco reunite, this time roping in fair maidens Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel, for what is a crushingly disappointing stab at side-splitting swords and sorcery.
Fabious (Franco) and Thadeous (McBride) are royal siblings from opposite ends of the gene pool; Fabious is, as his name would suggest, the daring, heroic Prince, blessed with the good looks and a kingdoms worth of fawning admirers. Thadeous is a stereotypical McBride character; a boorish slob who is treated with contempt by the palace hierarchy and has a stomach for banquets rather than dragon slaying. When Fabious’ bride, Belladonna (Deschanel) is kidnapped by an evil wizard, it’s time for the brothers to dust off the weapons and light up a doobie in order to rescue her.
Your Highness is a comedy bereft of laughs. Essentially long, apparently ad-libbed sequences of uncomfortably awkward exchanges, during which the characters appear to be mucking about in fancy dress, unaware that they are meant to be following a script, or god forbid, entertaining the audience, are permeated by the odd chuckle that is only generated because the laugh quota has been so poor that you’ll reward any of the low brow “high points” with a laugh.
The overriding feeling of inadequacy is heightened by the underperformance of the talent involved. McBride is fast shaking off his supporting role tag and emerging as a genuine comedy actor on the strength of his filthy anti-hero, Kenny Powers, in HBO’s pitch black show Eastbound and Down. The problem here is that although swearing can be big and clever when used to accentuate the laughs, here it’s all McBride does and it gets boring fast.
Franco, riding on the crest of a wave after 127 Hours, appears to have walked straight from his dazed and confused Oscar presenting gig and onto set. A wonderfully talented performer reduced to playing the giggling straight man to McBride’s buffoonery.
And as for those delectable maidens, that’s all they are here for, as eye candy. Neither Deschanel or Portman get any decent lines, with the former returning to her “glazed over” setting that she utilised to such wooden effect in The Happening, while the Black Swan princess is asked to push up her cleavage and take a scantily clad swim in her duck pond whilst being the butt of our heroic adventurers’ juvenile comments.
Now I’m no cinematic snob. I love low-brow, close to the bone comedy. Done correctly you get Dumb and Dumber or the criminally underrated Observe & Report, but barring a scene stealing perverted puppet and Justin Theroux’s useless baddie, this is a barren wasteland of genuinely second-rate laughs. And nobody is more saddened by that, than me.
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