Why ‘Your Highness’ Is the Biggest Disappointment of the Year

Your Highness is the biggest disappointment of the year so far.

Yes even more disappointing than "Sucker Punch." I wasn’t expecting that much from "Sucker Punch." Your Highness I really, really wanted to like. I kept hoping the Godawful Rotten Tomatoes rating was wrong.

But no. That rating is very accurate. I won’t go as far as Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com who claims it is tear-a-hole-in-the-fabric-of-reality bad. In a world where "Epic Movie," "Meet the Spartans" and "Pocket Ninjas" exist, "Your Highness" can only ever hope to be the fourth worst movie ever put together.

And I don’t want to give "Your Highness" any kind of backhanded praise. Some bad movies have entertainment value in their awfulness like "The Room," "Birdemic" and yeah "Sucker Punch." There’s none of that in "YH." It’s the kind of bad that leaves you feeling angry and cheated.

That’s because "YH" is the most infuriating kind of failure; one that’s due to a lack of effort, a lack of commitment. I have no idea how funny "Your Highness" might have been, but we’ll never really know because the filmmakers went only part of the way. This movie isn’t so much an “F” as an “Incomplete.”

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Start with the premise: a fantasy adventure with stoners. One of the big problems is that stoners and fantasy epics aren’t an obvious combination. Sure Gandalf loves the Halfling’s leaf a little too much, but that’s a pretty obscure reference. The two elements don’t go together the way potheads and drug dealers did in "Pineapple Express."

That meant the filmmakers would have to put some real effort to make sure the central joke stayed in the movie. But they didn’t. And because of that the pot references completely die off soon after the first act. So you have a film whose title is a pun about drug use that doesn’t have anyone getting baked after the first half hour. Shouldn’t this have been a red flag?

Then there’s the story. I’ll be the first to admit it’s past time someone poked fun at the fantasy adventure genre. But you have to be smart when you make a farce. "Pineapple Express" was smart about action movies. Take out the jokes and "Express" could be the kind of mid '80s early '90s actioner that used to play on HBO every Thursday night.

"Highness" doesn’t get everything wrong. The scene in the arena where the bad guy thrusts his hand into a cauldron of goo and a hand shaped hydra pops out of the earth was very good. If the rest of the movie had that much imagination and focus it would have been a great ride. But instead we get a bunch of half formed jokes from a dozen unrelated sources.

There’s a mechanical bird from the original "Clash of the Titans." There’s an aborted musical number from "Beauty and the Beast." There’s a chastity belt gag from "Robin Hood: Men in Tights." Most of these are just thrown in there and barely qualify as jokes. The mechanical bird is there just to be in there. Apparently its mere presence was supposed to be hilarious.

That’s not the only example of lazy gag writing. The beginning is this really ill-conceived sequence in a dwarf kingdom. Even the credits are a head scratcher. It’s supposed to be composed of scenes from an illustrated book but the drawings look like they’re from a graphic novel, one that somebody doodled on. I’m harping on little things but it’s the little things that make a comedy. I kept waiting for this movie to produce anything as memorable as the scenes at Red’s house in "Pineapple."

Finally there are the characters and this is where the movie really falls down. They actually thought they could pass off Danny McBride’s Thadeous as the younger brother to James Franco’s Fabious. McBride at least has some inner life to him. He’s shown as somebody so tired of disappointing those around him that’s he’s stopped trying.

Unfortunately they took that one sentence and just stopped. That was all the character development they put into the main role. Thadeous is about one fifth the character Dale or Saul or Red is and that’s being generous. Franco’s Fabious is even worse. There’s a little bit about him envying his younger brother’s freedom from responsibility but that’s just tacked on. Most of the time he’s not even vaguely relatable as a human being.

Franco does his best. You can see him struggling to give more. Unfortunately the time to fight for the character was during the writing process. Natalie Portman looks hot, kicks ass, and cashes a paycheck. She was probably just grateful she didn’t have to suffer through another romantic talk about sand.

The one character who comes closest to being fully developed is Courtney played by Rasmus Hardiker. He comes off as more courageous than the two heroes since he hangs around even though he has no personal stake in the adventure. The other partial success is Zooey Deschanel. She plays a princess who has been locked in a tower her whole life and therefore doesn’t know anything about the outside world, like for instance table manners or dancing. She has some very funny moments in the beginning. But again the filmmakers don’t build on this and it never comes up again.

And that’s all this movie has, just bits and pieces. The few good parts make the filmmakers look even worse. Clearly they had some good ideas and some imagination but they just didn’t put in the time and effort to develop these things. Lack of talent or ability you can forgive. Lack effort, not so much.