FILM REVIEW: YOUR HIGHNESS

Thaddeus (co-writer Danny McBride) in Your Highness.

Beasts and beat offs

By John Esther

Judging by the responses at a recent media screening with critics, film reviewers and cinema civilians, audiences will need to be of a certain mindset to enjoy the depravity, joy and juvenilia of Your Highness. After fifteen minutes or into Your Highness some felt it was necessary to switch gears and guffaw his or her hardest at every moment possible, even if a visual pun was sexist in (un)nature or a joke implied child molestation with a Yoda-creature (Mario Torres) while others remained unamused in the face of a Minotaur with an erection or watched the words "I've had a burning in my beaver" come out of the mouth of the recent Oscar-winning actress, Natalie Portman (Black Swan).

Set in some mystical medieval kingdom, Thaddeus (co-writer Danny McBride) is the second rate son of King Tallious (Charles Dance). Thaddeus just wants to toke it all in, spread the harem out and daze away with his slave, Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker). A man of little action, Thaddeus is a great disappointment compared to his brave older brother, Fabious (James Franco, who is younger than McBride).  

A legendary warrior, Fabious and his men have just returned from another knightly journey -- this time with the head of a cyclops and Fabious' bride to be, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a flowered princess whose lifelong seclusion has taught her to sing well, but little in the way of befitting decorum.

Asked to be the best man at Fabious' wedding, Thaddeus misses the nuptials, preferring to smoke some primo herb and chase sheep around instead. As a result he is not there when Leezar (Justin Theroux) the wizard takes a wiz on the wedding and re-steals Belladonna. Now Fabious, Thaddeus and company must stop "The Fuckining" before it is too late.

So the quest begins, in all its self-reflective, déclassé diegesis. As the characters state their timeworn-ed out lines of knighthood lore, encounter bare-breasted women, slay dragon-like creatures and sojourn toward the predictable conclusion, Your Highness shows very little in taking the high road or itself serious. It merely mocks what it understands oh so well without being cynical, although occasionally quite distasteful. 

Directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), in Dark-Ages light of the film's tongue-up-cheeks satire on knighthood lore vis-à-vis the deliberate dialogue, steady homoeroticism and multiple metaphors for castration, one gathers a number of those geek & nerd fests, such as Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, are being ridiculed. The harder you are for fantasy, the limper you are for Your Highness.

For a film marketed for younger audiences -- yet, dare I say, geared toward matured audiences (certainly the "primo-herbed" ones) -- the film's deconstruction of some myths is clearly the film's strongest attribute and somewhat of a rebuttal to those who think the writer-director who started off with notably independent films like George Washington and Snow Angels has become any less edgier. Green can shoot an action scene, too. 

Okay, Your Highness does not reach the great depths of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols in shattering the sanctity of paradigmatic presentation and prose, but it will definitely upset comic book guy filmgoers -- often as anti-intellectual as non-athletic -- raised on a diet of dorky fairytales where goober guy is a warrior beyond all socially-inept and transferred viewer's dreams. 

However, Your Highness is not some cock & fuel dream either. Isabel (Portman) proves to be the mightiest of warriors as she metaphorically-castrates or penetrates her foes to death (all the while wearing an unusual chastity belt. How does she urinate?). Moreover, Your Highness frequently embraces the homoeroticism that dares not mention its name in Hollywood Blockbusters of this kind. From Lethal Weapon to Rush Hour to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, Hollywood has given a new generation of filmgoers much manly tension to muster without much mention. Perhaps that is why younger generations tend to be more GLBT-friendly? That the buddies here are brothers -- and we know how incestuous royal families can be -- only pushes the film closer to the edge.

Granted, this machismo mockery only goes so far. There is something to be said via the three biggest villains in the film: a virgin mamas' boy, a "dickless wonder" and a bisexual in love with Fabious. And the film does parade more than its share of naked women without giving the non-gay girls something to look at in exchange.

Still the film has its attributes yet you may want to think twice about who you go see Your Highness with. Funny movies are diminished when your companion is not laughing. Going down pretty low to raze a few higher ups, Your Highness requires a certain taste that is not necessarily refined but adaptable to its play(against the)ground rules.