Your Highness (2011)

by **Hobb** Sat 22 Apr 2017 - 20:06

Roger Ebert wrote:"Your Highness" is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words. One of the heroes even wears the penis of a minotaur on a string around his neck. * out of **** stars

Wikipedia wrote:The film received negative reviews from critics and was a box office bomb, grossing $28 million worldwide against a $50 million budget.

Star James Franco would later poke fun at the film's poor reception during his Comedy Central Roast, saying “I agreed to do this roast because I wanted to do something I’ve never done before — something that has zero artistic value, something nobody will remember three months from now, something that’s offensive, homophobic and stars horrifically untalented people and something that’s only a big deal to a handful of teenage stoners on Twitter. You might say, ‘James, didn’t you just describe Your Highness?' I wouldn’t know, I didn’t see Your Highness.”

It's a 'stoner'/'bromance' template with a typical but solid fantasy plot and the vulgarity cranked up. The tone is somewhere between Black Adder and Tom Green. Molestation jokes, dwarf-fucking, Magicka-style wizard fights. Homophobic jokes so omnipresent that it is just background noise. Deadpan sarcasm, cynical asides, pure stupidity. Swear-words randomly mixed into old-timey English.

It is surprising how well it captured my experience of playing RPGs as a teenager. I suspect this is the most honest depiction of D&D every made.

A good test to see if you would enjoy the movie is to try a few random cartoons out of OGLAF. If you find OGLAF funny - and you understand that 'Your
Highness' is far dumber than OGLAF - than you might be the audience for this movie.

IMDB wrote:The same year 'Your Highness' came out, the HBO fantasy drama series "Game of Thrones" premiered. In the series, Charles Dances played Tywin Lannister. In this film, Charles Dance plays King Tallious.

Hobb fact: Charles Dances is the great bad-guy from The Golden Child and Eddie Murphy's sarcastic take on Asian mysticism in that film is very similar to Dan McBride in Your Highness.

Given the choice between 86-hours of grimdark dynastic slaughter fantasy and an hour of vulgar stoner fantasy. America choose the former.
Make the wiser choice - choose the one that has minotaur dong.