Review: Your Highness

Your Highness is the perfect illustration of the fact that if the script for a comedy isn’t funny, nothing can save it. Contrary to the remarks of most critics (who have understandably been caught up in chastising the “Oh, brother!”-inducing crude humor), the movie actually has quite a bit going for it. It boasts swift, well-paced direction by indie wunderkind David Gordon Green, beautiful widescreen cinematography by DP Tim Orr, and conviction-laden performances by a cast of comedically talented stars, for starters. But these strong elements are effectively irrelevant in light of the fact that they don’t help the movie do what it sets out to do: make the viewer laugh. It is never a good sign when I can remember how many times I do so during a comedy (in this case, I let out a mere three faint chuckles). It is a mystery why director Green, who made four devastatingly personal independent films in a row (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow, Snow Angels), has suddenly switched to diversionary stoner comedies. One wonders if Seth Rogen got Green addicted to the Ganja during Pineapple Express and, ever since, his judgment has been severely impaired.

Actor Danny McBride and his Foot Fist Way collaborator Ben Best wrote the ill-fated screenplay, which aspires to be Monty Python with the aforementioned stoner bent. However, Your Highness is not really a “stoner movie” in the classical sense, in that marijuana is rarely the main focus of a scene. It completely ignores the hallmark of the genre: satirizing potheads in a way that sober viewers can laugh at and baked ones can laugh with. Instead, Your Highness comes across as a movie that would only be funny under the influence of pot, which is hardly an accomplishment, as your average pothead finds just about anything funny. For the clearheaded audience member, the quest of the uncoordinated, moronic Prince Thadeous (McBride) and his more wieldy brother Prince Fabious (James Franco) to save Fabious’ kidnapped fiancee (Zooey Deschanel) is a grueling one. Almost all of the humor is bodily function-oriented, as if McBride and Best picked every line of the script from a middle-school lunch-yard and then made them Medieval-sounding to fit the material. Adam Sandler humor seems witty by comparison.

Yes, as I mentioned in the introduction, the movie is assembled and performed with a seemingly out-of-place level of competence, thanks to the seasoned cast and crew. This makes Your Highness a lot more watchable than it could have been, as it is able to secondarily function as a halfway-decent (if one-dimensional) action-adventure film. After all, Green’s hammy direction and the exaggerated performances of McBride, Franco, and Natalie Portman (playing a badass warrior they meet on their quest) are actually not too far off from what passes for serious “historical epic” characterizations these days. The film’s “second genre” should admittedly help the viewer to not become overly enraged that they’ve paid $10 to hear penis jokes they learned when they were 12. But then again, is the cast and crew’s salvation of Your Highness really that honorable? There is no reason that these talented folks should not be collaborating on a great film together, as they have all demonstrated they can make one. (Even McBride and Best have written good scripts in the past, for The Foot Fist Way and their HBO series “Eastbound & Down”.) Instead, they all simply bumble around like idiots in Your Highness, which would be OK if said bumbling was funny. Alas, it is not.

* * *

Your Highness (2011, USA). Produced by Andrew Z. Davis, Mark Huffam, Peter McAleese, Danny McBride, Jon Mone, and Scott Stuber. Directed by David Gordon Green. Written for the screen by Danny McBride and Ben Best. Starring Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Rasmus Hardiker, Toby Jones, and Justin Theroux. Distributed by Universal Pictures. Rated R with a running time of 102 minutes.