Your Highness (2011)

What would happen if the Iliad of Homer were adapted for the screen by a pair of 14-year old boys who had recently watched a movie marathon of The Princess Bride, Labyrinth, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Star Wars, and Up in Smoke? You guessed it: a film that looks a lot like Your Highness. This medieval stoner comedy manages to be puerile, potty-mouthed and pointless but still kind of fun. Prithee, dear reader, lend thine eyes.

Danny McBride, who co-wrote the script with Ben Best, stars as Thadeous, the younger prince of Mourne, a remarkably Earth-like planet that just happens to have two moons. He is a childish, lazy coward who would rather smoke magical herbs and bed the wives of dwarves than anything else in all the land. Meanwhile, his older brother Fabious (James Franco) is as Harlequin-romantic as his name obviously signals. At the start of the film, the son with the perfect teeth and flowing hair returns from his latest quest with the head of a conquered Cyclops and the heart of fair virgin Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) firmly in his grasp. But just as Fabious and Belladonna are about to wed, the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux) kidnaps her for his own nefarious plots.

The king decides that it’s high time that his younger boy gets off his round rump and accompanies his brother on the quest to rescue Belladonna. Along the way, they meet Isabel (Natalie Portman), or Xena Warrior Princess Leia in a Golden Thong Bikini, who is on a quest of her own to avenge her slain family. The three, along with Thadeous’s gangly manservant Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), team up and journey together.

And with every step in this David Gordon Green-helmed picture comes another adolescent sex joke. Oh, Your Highness cloaks them in the usual fantasy-adventure suspects: a wise—if high-as-a-kite—puppet wizard that looks like a cross between Yoda and Jar Jar Binks and has a sex-type thing for little boys; bare-breasted and paint-smeared sirens; a five-headed snake beast, controlled by a chubby, androgynous dude in a diaper; a randy, well-hung Minotaur; and a hundred-year-old ritual called a “fuckening,” a word which is ball-achingly dumb and unexpectedly funny every time it’s said.

Individually, none of these adventures is really all that humorous. But somehow when they are put together and then combined with special effects that have the budget and realism of an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (not to mention a similar disrespect of time and space), it’s all too intentionally bad to not be good. It almost becomes art in a Thierry Guetta, Exit Through the Gift Shop sort of way. Almost.

The inclusion of not one, but two, recent Oscar nominees and an indie It-Girl only add to the “this can’t really be happening” surrealistic experience of watching Your Highness. Three-fourths of this cast can act, I mean really act, so what the hell are they doing with those over-the-top bad British accents that threaten to go off the rails for the entirety of this film? Why is darling Deschanel given so little to do besides bat her round, lemur-sized eyes at the camera? Why is notoriously modest Portman, who kept her clothes on for her role as a stripper in Closer and through lesbian adventures in The Black Swan, suddenly denuding her derriere? And most importantly, why is Franco swaying and grinning quite so hard at McBride, his Pineapple Express co-star, no matter what’s actually happening in the story?

Then, of course, there are Hardiker and Theroux, legitimately stealing every scene they’re in. Typically, the court jester and villain are the characters from whom you’d least expect subtlety and dimension. But here, they’ve got most of it (which, admittedly, is still not all that much). It’s all got to be some Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-type reference or else part of some self-aware comic “fuck-you” to the guys who green-lit this stuff, right?

No, I’m not high.

I will say that this film depends too heavily on the charm, or lack thereof, of Danny McBride. He’s an actor who exists in that now-familiar comedy realm with the likes of Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Russell Brand and Zach Galifianakis—either you’re on board with his revolting stupidity or he makes you want to gnaw your own arm off. Typically, I exist in the latter camp, with only brief, sleepwalking visits to the former and so his copious amount of screen time was a reminder that sometimes stupid just is.

Ultimately, Your Highness dwells on too few notes (well, really just the one groin-centered note) for far too long to be any sort of match for the films that it eagerly apes. Walk, don’t run to the theater for this one. Or better yet, wait to watch it at home, where you can, ahem, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Something tells me you’ll like it better that way.