Your Highness – movie review

With a great cast, some awesome special effects, and a trailer that promised some good laughs, Your Highness had all the early hallmarks of an instant classic.

The story follows the fortunes of Prince Thadeous (Danny McBride), a bumbling, fumbling, and fornicating joke of a Prince, on his journey to manhood. His brother, the dashing, heroic, and subtly camp Prince Fabious (James Franco) returns from his latest quest with his bride to be, Belladonna, played by the always delightful Zooey Deschanel. During the wedding ceremony the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux) crashes the party and amidst some dazzling special effects kidnaps Belladonna, which leads, as you’ve probably guessed, to another quest–with one new twist. King Tallious, played by personal favourite Charles Dance, insists that Thadeous accompany his brother on the quest to rescue Belladonna and kill Leezar, or be banished from the kingdom.

The story was, overall, fairly decent but was unfortunately let down by the sort of humour normally reserved for a group of horny teenage boys behind the bike sheds at a private school. Before you say “well, the trailer made that clear, n’cest pas?” I say, yes, but I didn’t realise that the entire film would be based on wank/paedophile jokes as the entire premise of all the gags! They also did the whole swearing-made-funny-by-being-juxtaposed-with-classical-fantasy-language joke to death, and then flogged the damn corpse! Furthermore, the delight with which the F word is used is as mystifying as it is gratuitous with almost every line of “dialogue” containing a minimum of one F***-bomb, which seemed to entertain everyone except me.

I sat there in the cinema surrounded by laughing people (about ten of them) wondering when the real wit was going to start. It never did. The action scenes were mildly entertaining, though the director’s frequent use of the close-up, rapidly shifting camera angle approach to fight scenes just got on my tits…oh, and speaking of tits, there is a selection of all shapes and sizes to keep the most devoted porn aficionados occupied while they bemoan the utter waste of their time. It calls to mind the very worst of the old British “Carry-On” films with added puerile vulgarity and none of the cheeky charm.

The only character who was consistently funny was Leezar, played with extraordinary commitment and verve by Justin Theroux; Natalie Portman lent the only gravitas available in this festival of the farcical and played the strong, silent female hero with an admirable focus that inspired a fair few laugh out loud moments. I would be remiss if I didn’t give special mention to the visual effects, particularly the magic. In a world where special effects aren’t all that special any more, I felt that these stood out. I’m aware that part of this may be because I had little else to get my teeth into.

Apart from those brief rays of light amidst the darkness, this was an otherwise thoroughly forgettable film that I can’t really recommend in good conscience. I found myself wondering whether the film is in fact a brilliant and subtle satirising of…stuff, and that I’ve simply missed the point while all my fellow movie-goers are laughing at this tongue-in-cheek commentary on modern social values and cultural attitudes to sex and sexuality. Sadly I felt forced to come to the conclusion that everyone but me enjoys tit/arse/wank/paedophile/gay jokes in rapid, relentless succession over the space of 102 minutes. I felt so left out!

Perhaps, at the ripe old age of 35, I’ve become too stuffy and serious to find much joy in such humour? I know not, dear reader. But if I’m brutally honest I really thought (perhaps naively) that as a culture we’d moved on a little. Apparently not.