Your Highness (Review)

Your Highness has quite the sense of humor, you see. First and foremost, there’s a joke right there in the title. Hilarious, right? Furthermore, most of the characters’ names end in “-ious,” as in Thadeous, Fabious and Tallious. And that’s not counting the male characters with female names, such as Courtney and Julie. Also, there are bare breasts – many of them found in a single scene. These are all things that Your Highness finds inherently hilarious. Why write jokes when you already have so many brilliant ideas?

Danny McBride plays the aforementioned Thadeous, a prince who mostly spends his time sitting around smoking and doing absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, his heroic brother Fabious (James Franco) always seems to be out slaying beasts and courting women. One day he brings home his bride-to-be Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), but it isn’t long before she’s kidnapped by Leezar – a warlock played by Justin Theroux. Now Fabious and Thadeous must set off to save her together, and they’re soon joined by the brave and bloodthirsty Isabel (Natalie Portman).

There’s nothing terribly offensive about Your Highness. It just kind of sits there without much energy or wit to offer. The viewing experience isn’t so much upsetting as it is aggressively lame. You sit waiting for the humor to come, but in never surfaces. The IMDb Trivia page for the film claims that a script was never used on set, and the film itself was mostly improvised. I’m a firm believer that improvised comedy can lead to great comedy, but Your Highness is nonchalant to a fault. Scripts are there for a reason; they provide direction and motivation for the plot. When a bunch of actors sit around and try to make each other laugh, it almost never translates to audience enjoyment.

The film is all the more perplexing due to the people involved. Natalie Portman just won an Oscar for Black Swan. James Franco was nominated for 127 Hours. Danny McBride has been hilarious in many supporting roles, but Your Highness proves that he isn’t best as a leading man. A more interesting version of the film might have placed Thadeous in the background rather than putting him front and center.

Most depressing here is the direction of David Gordon Green, which adds nothing to the already weak material. Early in his career, he was a well-respected indie filmmaker who made films that weren’t only embraced – they were adored. In 2008, the terrific Apatow comedy Pineapple Express was seen as a drastic departure. Now, with Your Highness, dumb stoner comedies are starting to be his status quo. This film is a waste of perfectly good talent all around, and Green no longer seems interested in ambition. I hope he proves otherwise.

One film Your Highness is trying to emulate seems to be the comedy classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The problem is that it doesn’t know what made that film so funny. The characters in Holy Grail are always utterly humorless. If you were to watch any five minutes of that film out of context, it may take you a while to realize it’s all being played for laughs. No one involved thinks they’re being funny, and the gravity with which they treat each situation is what makes it all so effective. Contrast this with Your Highness, where everyone involved seems convinced they’re making the funniest thing since the invention of laughter.

Recently on the podcast Doug Loves Movies, comedian Doug Benson had Rainn Wilson and James Gunn on the show to talk about their new film Super (yet to reach me in Columbus). Wilson says that he’s been in many films that were a blast to shoot, yet the finished product wound up being terrible. He and Gunn then go on to say that Super was an absolute nightmare to make, yet they are incredibly proud of the film itself. Your Highness seems to be a perfect example of the former. You can yuk it up on set all you want; when the film comes out no one’s going to care.

Rating:  (out of 4)