How much you like ?Your Highness? will depend on how much you enjoy Danny McBride movies, and how funny you find it when characters in period pictures curse like Samuel L. Jackson.
About 10 minutes in I confirmed that my answers were ?not much? and ?not at all.?
You might feel otherwise ? certainly plenty of people laughed at the screening I went to. But if the idea of knights dropping the F-bomb doesn?t strike you as hilarious ? prithee, dear friend, ride on.
The story, co-written by star McBride, features him in his usual mode ? loutish, dumb-as-dirt and defiantly unsympathetic. He?s the black sheep of his father?s castle; James Franco is the noble heir.
But then vile treachery occurs. And the two brothers must together undertake a most perilous quest.
The big joke, though, is that McBride is a medieval slacker who, faced with the chance to slay a dragon, would much rather play pranks and smoke ?magical herbs.? (Get the title now?) It?s like a Cheech and Chong movie, but without Chong.
None of this is very funny, and most of it is pretty ugly ? the last half-hour or so is a paroxysm of bad special effects, amputated limbs and a severed sexual organ. Franco is never more than sappy, and McBride ? tolerable in small doses ? simply hogs the screen.
Your Highness (R) Universal (102 min.) Directed by David Gordon Green. With Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel. Now playing in New Jersey
Rating note: The film contains nudity, gory violence and endless profanity.
Stephen Whitty's Review: ONE STAR
The only possible diversion is trying to figure out why the other actors are here at all.
Like smart Zooey Deschanel, playing a character who exists only to bat her lashes and be threatened with deflowering. Or the once-modest Natalie Portman ? her lap-dancer in ?Closer? was practically PG-rated ? who chooses this movie to do a gratuitous thong scene.
What exactly were they thinking?
There is one good monster here, an angry minotaur. And a few evocative exteriors (the film was shot in Northern Ireland).
But it?s all drowned under the usual frat-boy comedy garbage. Queasy gags about child molesting, and horrified references to gay sex. Big bromantic hugs. Toilet-training humor about pee and poo.
It?s not just that ?Monty Python and the Holy Grail? was a lot funnier. ?127 Hours? was a lot funnier ? and that movie also had tips on how to extricate yourself from unbearable situations. Which, watching this film, I thought about often, as I grasped my pocketknife.
Maybe this will be fun for McBride?s friends and fans, whoever they are. Maybe you just need to see it in on a DVD in a dorm room ? after first partaking of much grog, or some wizard?s magical herbs.
But for the rest of us simply looking for a comedy this weekend ? well, the noble quest continues.
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