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DVD Review: Your Highness (2011) August 11, 2011

Posted by pacejmiller in Movie Reviews, Reviews.
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3 comments

Amazingly, when I searched for this movie poster with the search term 'Your Highness', most of the results featured pictures of Natalie Portman's infamous butt scene.

Your Highness is the ultimate ‘stoner’ movie.  The writers were likely stoned when they wrote the ‘script’.  The director and actors were probably stoned when they shot the film.  And as the title of the film suggests, you most definitely have to be stoned (or 8 years old, probably both) to find it funny.  Sadly for me, I wasn’t.  My single feeble attempt in Amsterdam several years ago (with a space cake and lollipop) did nothing except put me to sleep.  A great sleep, mind you, but nevertheless…

I actually had relatively high expectations for Your Highness.  I’m a big fan of Pineapple Express, which featured the two lead stars of this film, Danny McBride and James Franco, as two polar-opposite princes.  Throw in two of my favourite actresses, Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel, and put them all in a farcical high fantasy setting — the potential for belly-ripping laughs was enormous.

But as it turned out, Your Highness was 102 minutes of adolescent, poorly conceived sex, penis and gay jokes and gags, laced with copious amounts of mostly ill-timed profanity (well-timed profanity can be funny).  If you were as high as the people who made the film, maybe you would have found it as funny as they did, but I simply found it, for the most part, incredibly lame.  A few mild cackles here and there, but nothing approaching a genuine laugh.

I really don’t understand what they were trying to achieve with this.  As a comedy, it wasn’t funny, or at least nowhere near funny enough.  As a fantasy, it was cliched, unimaginative and lacking in wonder (and the special effects were atrocious, though perhaps intentionally so).  As an action film, the fight scenes were tame and lethargic.  Calling it ‘mediocre’ would be a huge compliment.

After doing some research, I discovered that the dialogue for Your Highness was ‘entirely improvised’, save for a basic written outline by scriptwriters Ben Best and Danny McBride.  That explains a lot.

1.5 stars out of 5