Peter Hodges

Your Highness is a movie of wasted potential. Hearkening back to the B-movie escapades of fantasy films in the 80′s, this movie could have stimulated a revival that would thrill eager boys in the pre-teen and early teen demographics. Contrariwise, this could have been the best, most raunchy, epic send-up of the fantasy and medieval action genres EVER. The problem is that the script and the director had an identity crisis, and didn’t go firmly enough in one direction to make the film really work.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some truly funny moments, including one in which I almost spewed Diet Dr. Pepper all over the people in front of me. There is the obligatory gratuitous nudity. There is the odd juxtaposition of modern crude vernacular in a medieval setting (which in most cases is genuinely amusing), and there is the shot of Natalie Portman in a thong. But all this is barely held together by the douche-baggery of Danny Mcbride’s Prince Thadeous. If he were a little more heroic, or allowed to ad-lib a little more (see his turn in Tropic Thunder for a glimpse of his genius), the comic heights of the movie would have been greater.

Rasmus Hardiker is the movie’s secret gem–he plays Thadeous’ jester/squire. His portrayal is the foundation of a lot of scenes, despite the fact that he only has a few lines. James Franco is less impressive in the role as the noble Prince Fabious. He’s a little too good to be true, and Franco doesn’t quite hit the right tone for me. I felt like he was play-acting, rather than really immersed in the role. That might be heady criticism for something meant to be a comedy, but not believing an actor’s performance can be jarring for me.

Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel make respectable eye-candy, as well as being part of the trifecta of actresses in which I would demand that my wife hold the camera for while I…ahem. (Scarlett Johassen is the third member of that august body.) Portman works well as a comedic and action actress, and it makes me a little sad that she didn’t have more to work with here. In a role similar to the ones Angelina Jolie has been getting over the past year, I think she would be absolutely dynamite.

Should you see the movie? Sure…if you can rent it on iTunes or watch it as a party with like-minded friends. I have to say that approaching the film with a modicum of intoxication would make it a lot funnier. I’m not sure I’d recommend spending money in the theater to see it.

This movie has been getting some hatred and vitriol from a lot of critics. In fact, the aggregate from Rotten Tomatoes is right at 20%. Let me be the first to assure you that the movie is not bad. In fact, it is far from the worst movie I’ve seen in a while (that honor goes to Jonah Hex from last summer).

The plot is layered, combining Zack Snyder’s familiar visual style (Watchmen, 300) with Matrix-style effects that haven’t been this visually compelling since the Wachowskis did it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is Inception–it doesn’t even come close. But as a pure popcorn spectacle with underlying social commentary on both entertainment and our perception of reality, it works quite well.

Spoilers follow.

Baby Doll, a very young-looking twenty year old, loses her mother in a vaguely 1950′s milieu. Her evil step father finds out that her mother left everything to Baby Doll and her younger sister in the will. The stepfather hatches a nefarious plan to abuse the girls. Baby Doll takes his gun and attempts to shoot him, but she misses and shoots her sister instead. Thus, she is institutionalized, and the head orderly is bribed to make sure she gets lobotomized in five days.

Baby Doll is then treated as a drudge, scrubbing floors, peeling potatoes, etc., until she begins therapy with a mysterious Polish psychiatrist. When she does, the institution is magically transformed into a slave-brothel. Baby Doll, suspected to be virginal, is being kept for a mysterious figure called “The High Roller,” arriving in five days. (Note the similarity in time frame above.)

To earn her keep, she must dance. When she does so, she is transported into another layer of fantasy where she must fight massive robotic samurai, dragons, zombie German soldiers, and stage a train robbery on one of Saturn’s moons. Confused yet? The frame story gyrates between one layer of fantasy and the next, never returning to the root world of the institution until the end. Inception, this isn’t, but it’s easy enough to follow if you pay VERY close attention in the beginning of the film.

The movie does have its flaws, the biggest being the emphasis of style over substance. The visuals themselves are loosely strung together, but the symbolism for them is rather cleverly orchestrated in the first ten minutes of the film.  The acting is about what you’d expect, but how Oscar-worthy does it have to be when you’re a hot girl with a gun against a green screen? Men 18-34 will drool, while those of us over 34 will recall our glory days playing video games with cleavage-bearing heroines with fondness.

I didn’t find the katana and Colt 1911-wielding heroine to be particularly enthralling, but Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea (featured in the poster above) was a different story. Not truly insane, she follows her sister onto the streets as a runaway and is voluntarily institutionalized to protect her. The story might really be hers; pay attention to her story arc throughout and you might be surprised at the layers of nuance.

Should you see the film? I think it depends a great deal on your sense of aesthetics. Some will appreciate the effects spectacle as the triumph that it is, while others will appreciate the social commentary on entertainment. As a popcorn movie, I found it to be worthy of IMAX admission price and will probably purchase a form of it in HD, whether on iTunes or Blu-Ray, as a show-off piece for the home theater system.

As a side note, I did cringe at the idea that Zack Snyder is the one in charge of the Superman reboot after watching this movie. I’m not sure Clark Kent can survive a Snyder-style makeover without kicking Lex Luthor off the roof of a building and yelling: “This is METROPOLIS!”