Your Highness (2011)

Directed by: David Gordon Green
Written by: Danny McBride, Ben Best
Cast: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Justin Theroux

Ah, the sorrow of living in your better brother's shadow.

Such is the story of Thadeous (Danny McBride), a pot smoking prince doofus who is constantly outdone by his noble brother Fabious (James Franco). That's not to say that Thadeous tries to be noble - far from it. It seems he spends most of his time smoking pot, chasing sheep, and getting lecherously abusive with female dwarves and servants.

Fabious gets all the attention yet again when he arrives with the head of the vile Cyclops that had been terrorizing the countryside. He also brings home a new bride-to-be; a young woman named Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) he found and rescued while out on his Cyclops killing quest. Unfortunately, what he doesn't know is that Belladonna had been a captive of the evil and mighty warlock Leezar (Justin Theroux), who had been saving her for a very, very special ceremony.

It's all about dragons, you see. You might think you know a few things about dragons. They're big. They breathe fire. They have scales, can fly, and like to hoard treasure. What you might not know is that they're conceived during the "Fuckening". The two moons in the sky align once every hundred years, and if a magical warlock rapes a virgin at precisely that time, she'll later give birth to a dragon. Yes, you heard me right; dragons are warlock-on-virgin rape babies conceived under aligned moons. No wonder they're so rare. I'm still a little confused on whether a C-section is required, or if the dragon mom drops an egg and has to sit on it for a time, or what - but I guess that's just getting lost in the details.

Leezar shows up to the party and is pretty irate that Fabious stole off with the virgin he was planning on raping at his dragon conceiving "Fuckening". He promptly steals her back and makes off to his wizard's tower. This prompts a new quest; Fabious must get his girl back, and the king orders Thadeous to help his brother, and do something positive for once in his stupid and worthless life.

So starts the quest. Fabious, Thadeous and crew make off down the road to find the magical Unicorn sword that can be used to slay the Warlock, and to get to the tower in time before Fabious' betrothed endures sexual assault and dragon birth. Along the way, they have many sub-adventures, which includes getting caught by topless female natives in a "booby trap", fighting giant snake monsters, getting raped by minotaurs, dealing with perverted puppet wizards, and eventually teaming up with the mighty warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman).

There are some pretty sizable problems in Your Highness, and they nearly all revolve around what it attempts to offer the most of - the comedy. This is pretty base stuff. It is vulgarity, but delivered with little to no wit. It settles for being gross instead of actually being clever, and ends up just feeling weird and a little unsettling. It's not that the movie simply dipped a toe in juvenile humor; it's more that it slopped buckets of juvenile humor into a huge trough and leapt into it, naked, to writhe around, moan, and undulate grossly while rubbing the muddy waters of a 12-year-olds humor into every pore and stinking orifice of its stupid, stupid being.

Examples abound. At the beginning of their quest, Fabious takes Thadious to see the Great Wise Wizard, as this wizard often offers magical artifacts and advice that can be helpful on a great quest. What Thadious learns there is that this wizard is also a pervert who has been sexually molesting Fabious since he was a young boy. Yes - that's the joke. Get it? The wizard itself is a strange pot smoking puppet with a lava lamp for the top of its head. After the wizard smokes pot with them and gives them advice and a magical artifact to help on their journey, he insists that they both give him a hand job. The two men comply, and masturbate the puppet. That's also the joke. Get it?

Later in the film, one of their men who is along on the quest with them is found to be a traitor. He tries to flee, but Thadious's best friend Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker) grabs the man's robe. In his effort to escape, his clothes rip and tear - leaving him naked. He's found to be missing a penis. No vagina either (this isn't The Crying Game) - it's just a plain old Barbie doll crotch. The men exclaim, and then they proceed to chase this strange looking naked person around the camp while he hoots and squeals and flashes his extremely strange non-crotch. That's also the joke. Get it?

This sort of humor rules the entire film, and this is as good as it gets. It's just banal and childish stupidity, and it just doesn't really work. It's like someone took all the gross parts of a few South Park episodes, stripped them of any imaginative wit or social commentary, and then left them to steam in the sun for a few days before serving it on a bed of boiled cabbage and white rice. In sophistication and clever wit, Your Highness is to the Fantasy genre what the 1980's film Galaxina was to Science Fiction, though just not as funny.

That isn't to say there wasn't a couple of things that I "kind of" liked about Your Highness. I liked the Unicorn Sword, or at least how it was introduced. I liked the weird hand-shaped Snake Monster. I liked all of the topless native girls, but that can't be helped. I also liked the three old witches who were allies to the evil Warlock Leezar; they expressed so much joy in casting evil spells that it was just a little fun to watch them work. But all of these things are tiny cosmetic sparkles in what is otherwise a resoundingly bad film that lowers the bar of humor not to the ground, but past it, through it, and all the way to China and beyond.

This is a Day Two Review.

Rating: (1.5 out of 5):