Your Highness

It's even harder to accept when a film doesn't live up to your expectations, when it is created by a group of talented people who have a proven track record of delivering well crafted material. I am a huge fan of nearly everybody involved in this film. Whether director David Gordon Green does sensitive indie, or raucuous comedy, he is never less than intriguing. Writers Danny McBride and Ben Best created the excellent and near classic HBO comedy series "Eastbound and Down", not to mention McBrides ability to never fail to be gut bustingly funny. Zooey Deschanel always provides loveliness and is one half of 'She & Him'. The other two; James Franco and Natalie Portman are both either oscar nominated or winners. Simply put, how did a film so bad get such a great group of people involved in it? I suppose McBrides and Bests intentions were noble. They wanted to craft a silly and very rude medieval fantasy comedy; a hark back to the cheesy epics of the 80's. Films more concerned with muscled men, godawful special effects and nonsensical plotting. But that in itself is one of the films problems. Those films are already unintentional laugh out loud fests. They do not need fun being poked at them for the average person to get that they are outdated. But then again, this would not be a problem had the film delivered decent gags. Dick and fart jokes are funny for about 5 minutes, until you realise that the film has another 90 or so to go. This is a sketch of an idea unmercifully stretched to feature film length. It's probably why that initial red band trailer raised expectations so much. The films main concept: that of a lazy coward younger brother, to the more classicly heroic older brother should have borne far funnier material that what we are left with. Instead, almost nothing works. Infact the films one saving grace comes in the form of Justin Theroux as the evil wizard Leezar. Usually known as the writer behind such recent films such as "Iron Man 2" and "Tropic Thunder" here plays a pretty warped and egotistical wizard. His odd and increasingly surreal musings provide the few moments of humour in the film. McBride and Best have previously gone on the record saying that while the entire film was written, most of it was changed and improvised on set. This scatter-shot approach groans and creaks throughout. With talent of this calibre, everything should really be of a much higher standard. It's not quite bad enough to truly damage anyone involved, but everyone will have to work extra hard next time, to erase this from memory. Magical it certainly isn't.

Verdict: 3/10
Too silly, too scatalogical and too disappointing when everything signalled so much more. If you're fans of the guys then it might be diverting enough, but for everyone else, this is a missed oppertunity.

"Your Highness" Trailer