Review: Your Highness (2011)

Your Highness
2011
102 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

David Gordon Green was once set to become the next Terrence Malick. His sober dramas of lower or middle class Americana (George Washington, Snow Angels, etc) were some of the finest examples of character-driven drama to come out of the last several years of independent cinema. Now the man seems stuck in a world where pointless brainless marijuana jokes and gay panic humor rules the day. Your Highness is fatally-stymied by a script by Ben Best and star Dannie McBride that still thinks that smoking weed is inherently funny, the 'f-word' is by-itself comic gold, and homosexuality is automatically repulsive. There are moments of successfully-ripping satire of 80s medieval action pictures, but (pardon the pun) higher aspirations go up in smoke.

Your Highness gets a red-band trailer.

More Your Highness Videos

I know the nerds have been going crazy over this one over the last 24 hours, but I'm not quite as impressed. Yes, the film looks pretty solid, arguably presenting a fantasy comedy (that may or may not pay homage to hack-n'-slashers like Dragonslayer and The Beastmaster) that feels more authentic than straight fantasy films like Eragon or Percy Jackson and the Olympians. But it just really isn't all that funny. Honestly, most of the would-be humor comes from characters using profanity in a medieval setting, which gets old pretty fast. Plus, while it's nice to see Natalie Portman in something a little different, would it kill the editors of this trailer to allow her to do or say anything funny at all in the whole 210 seconds? Fairing even worse is Zooey Deschanel, who spends the whole trailer as a damsel in distress. Yes, that's the archetype, but we know Deshanel can be highly amusing, so not give her a single funny line? It's no wonder Portman ended up writing a comedy script of her own. Still, it's kind of shocking that David Gorden Green, the man responsible for George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow, and Snow Angels (each one a masterpiece) is now making a go as the helmer of broad comedies such as this. I'm not sure if that's progress, but oh well.

Scott Mendelson