Your Highness
Starring: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Justin Theroux
Director: David Gordon Green
Rating: 2/5
Ever wondered what would happen if you put a Tolkien book and Pineapple Express in a blender? No? Well, worry no more, for Your Highness has come to your rescue.
Your Highness sees us join Thadeous (Danny McBride), the layabout prince of the somewhere not very unlike medieval England.
Always in the shadow of his brave, handsome, noble brother Fabious (James Franco), Thadius is an embarrassment to the kingdom with only his man servant Courtney standing by his side.
He must step to plate though when he is ordered to go along with his brother on a quest to rescue his fiancé, who has been stolen by the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux). Along the way they meet a perverted puppet wizard and team up with a beautiful warrior (Natalie Portman) in order to stop a dark prophecy coming true.
While director David Gordon Green managed to mix some sedate stoner humour and ridiculous action together well in Pineapple Express, he doesn’t pull off the same trick here. Neither the action nor the comedy ever reaches the heights of that Seth Rogen vehicle.
While Your Highness will occasionally make you laugh, it seems more like random luck than comic gold. This is a film that defiantly plays by the rule of quantity, not quality.
Add in that nearly, if not all, the good lines go to Thadious and Leezar and it leaves you with a lot of people working with scraps.
It never helps that the brand of humour usually on display is about as high brow as, well, the average frat-boy comedy that plagued the nineties. If you didn’t find genitalia and random swearing funny before this film, it’s not going to change your mind about them
This shows on screen. McBride and Theroux shine through but Franco, Portman and just about everyone else seem a little bored.
This is all made worse by a villain’s gallery of rubbish medieval English accents, making some dialogue heavy scenes more than a little tedious than they would usually have been.
While not bad, and does have a great joke every now and again, Your Highness is much less than the sum of its parts. With these actors and idea, this could have been a rude version of The Princess Bride.
It isn’t though, trading clever for crude and never keeping the receipt.
Your Highness is out now
FemaleFirst Cameron Smith