Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic, streaked with carelessly contemporary-sounding blue humor, blunt profanity replacing the naughty-naughty, tankard-sloshing, heaving-bosom ribaldry that goes with the period setting.
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Your Highness
Directed by David Gordon Green
Universal Pictures
Opens April 8
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The scene: a generic medieval realm from an EverQuest or Forgotten Realms module. In a kingdom beneath two moons, where everyone attempts English accents when they remember to, Prince Thadeous (Danny McBride) resigns himself to live in the shadow of his firstborn brother, Fabious (James Franco, strapping straight-man). In Goofus and Gallant style, as Thadeous loafs and tokes, Fabious returns flecked with gore and glory from his latest quest, having freed a bride-to-be, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), from fairy-tale captivity.
When wicked wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux) re-kidnaps Belladonna, planning to force her into ritual breeding, Fabious drags reluctant Thadeous along on a rescue mission; the party is eventually rounded out by Rasmus Hardiker as Thadeouss valetgiving the newtish reaction- shot cutaways treasured by Saxondale fansand Natalie Portman, in easily her greatest role as a vengeance-lusty ranger.
Your Highness was directed by David Gordon Green, from a scenario by Ben Best and McBride. The last time Green, McBride, and Deschanel worked together, the actors were relative unknowns on the set of the indie All the Real Girls (2003), filmed in the Black Mountains of North Carolina with the sword budget of Your Highness. More recently, Green has worked in comedy, directing Pineapple Express (2008) and episodes for Best and McBrides HBO series Eastbound & Down, in which McBride plays a Randy Myersesque braggart whose bullying is made forgivable by the transparency of his insecurities and his little-boy obsession with a heroic ideal of his life.
Greens crossover comedies aren't necessarily a 180-degree turn from his earlier work. The innocence found in his first feature, George Washington (2000), is parodied in the interplay between McBride and Franco, who seem like eager, frightened, petulant children, swashbuckling with cardboard tubes (I dont want to do swords with you, I was doing it by myself). The splashy bloodshed is so much red crayon. The picaresque quest model in Greens Undertow (2004) continues with the wayfaring stoners of Pineapple Express and, in his latest, with McBrides peasant-prince, as the unfurling discovery of the directors road-movie storytelling keeps Your Highness buzzing.
The fantasy setting is selected less for Bored of the Rings send-upthough there is obvious relish in putting dumpy McBride into Boris Vallejo landscapesthan to license anything-goes liberation. One giddy sequence starts with Thadeous mocking Fabiouss anxiety about his brides endangered maidenheadas in All the Real Girls, the plot hinges on Deschanels intact virginitywhen theyre suddenly surrounded by nude, mud-daubed warrior nymphs from the sleeve of the Slits Cut; they drag the captive heroes into a primitive coliseum presided over by an infantilized chieftain with a spit curl squiggle down his forehead who wields a hand-puppet hydra.
But such unobstructed, whooping, and wheeling free association isnt the rule. The movies improvisatory recklessness often relies on stock, fallback comedy: scenes lazily punchlined on four-letter words, pot slang, and gay jokes only offensive in their unoriginality.
The constant raunch in Your Highness spoofs on the horny confusion of the adolescent audience that fantasy art has traditionally catered to. A climactic battle royale rages around Leezars performance anxietyTheroux plays the wizard with very funny insidious skeeviness, like a dirty kid bluffing at experience. Much mileage is elsewhere got from a Minotaur dong, while the last laugh makes it very clear that the grail of every magical adventure is actual sex (after which most folks ditch their Dungeon Masters Guide).
In the film's opening credits, Prince Valiantstyle illustrations of the characters are graffitid with drawn-on dicks, tits, and lit jointslike the vandalized movie posters in the subway that make the advertised products seem much more entertaining than they could ever possibly be. So through auto-defacement does Your Highness restore the heroic saga.