Your Highness (Universal Pictures)
Your Lowness
The new James Franco/Danny McBride film Your Highness has a lot of things wrong with it from the outset. It is crude and crass from the start which might appeal to young teenage boys but the R rating will in some ways keep them from seeing it on the big screen. There is also the failure to have even one appealing character. If you dont have someone with whom the audience relates then you have the audience feeling like outsiders from beginning to end. And finally a comedy needs to be funny; this one isnt.
The story concerns two brothers, Prince Fabious (Franco) and his brother Thaddeus (McBride). They are the sons of King Tallious (Charles Dance) who obviously prefers Fabious because he is all things heroic and Thaddeus, well he is all things slacker.
When Fabious fianc Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) is abducted on the eve of their wedding, Fabious immediately makes plans to get her back. He knows this means going up against the great sorcerer Leezar (Justin Theroux). He enlists the aid of his brother in this quest. Thaddeus at first says no but later relents and joins the group. Along the way they are joined by a warrior woman named Isabel. She too agrees to help Fabious get his bride to be back.
All of this plotting and planning leads to nothing exciting and certainly nothing entertaining. The script which McBride helped co-write is one crude and smug arrangement of words after another but every attempt at humor falls flat. If you are going to be crude you had better be funny because crude in an of itself turns off audiences. It is a thin line to walk but movies like The Hangover seemed to find the balance, Your Highness does not.
Franco does nothing to enhance his career with this role and after his wooden performance as the Academy Award co-host he is being viewed as someone who needs a hit movie and not just a hit. McBride is a lot like Russell Brand. You either like him a lot or dislike him intensely. Too many people seem to dislike him intensely.
Then there is the strange case of Natalie Portman being in this film. This is the worst follow up film for an Oscar nominee since Eddie Murphy followed Dreamgirls with Norbit. She actually won the Oscar for Best Actress and now she is in this mess of a film! Why, Natalie, why!!
The film is rated R for profanity, nudity, violence and crude humor.
Many people would want to see anything in which Natalie Portman appears, but make an exception for this one. This one is not up to her talents or even those of Franco and (gulp) McBride. It is a film to be avoided even on DVD.
I scored Your Highness a lowly 2 out of 10.
