I am going to have to preface this review-- in the spirit of full disclosure-- with the following statement. I adore Natalie Portman. It is rare I find major fault with her work, and usually it is with the overall film and not with her performance. Now that you know where my bias stands, here is my attempt at an objective review of Your Highness (R) starring Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, and Zooey Deschanel.
Your Highness was full of a lot of crude humour. I am, first off, going to give it credit for never making potty jokes. I really can't stand teen comedies where someone has to reach into a toilet or gets crapped on. It's sickening, more so than blood and guts and the raunchiest sex joke. Your Highness never went into toilet humour.
The problem with Your Highness is the sheer volume of sex jokes. That's not to say that adult humour has a limit, just that when it's as copious as it was in this flick, it tends to be more noticable which jokes are better than others. Some moments in the film lead to repeated fits of riotous laughter (particularly Thadeous' trophy). Others seem forced. There is plenty of room for immature humour to flow organically, but more than a handful of jokes in the film seem inserted just to fit them in somewhere.
This comes to the main point of my review. There is a context through which to view this movie that accounts for the forced adult humour and anachronistic exclamations. Maybe it was easier for me, being a gamer and only out of college since 2008. That's right. You got it. You need to view Your Highness as a tabletop role-playing campaign taking place in a college dorm.
Can you see it now? If you haven't seen the film, let me spell it out for you in the most spoiler-free way I can. Fabious (Franco) is played by a veteran gamer who knows how to stack his stats and loves to role play the hero. Belladonna (Deschanel) is played by his girlfriend, who at first came along because she wants to do everything with him, but later gets into it. Thadeous (McBride) is played by the nerd who fancies himself a frat boy and is more interested in tail and loot than the planned heroic quest.
The Game Master, who controls the rest of the cast of characters, has a pretty well thought-out, epic plot. There are stages to the quest, a Campbell-esque hero's journey, and though it's a tad predictable how the plot will develop, it's still fun to be part of the adventure. At times he has written epic speeches for the villains and at times their back-talk and inquiry catches him off guard and he slips out of his character voice and into something more wry and a little bit silly. Despite his goofy moments, he knows his players and he knows how to lure them down the path he has written with naked women and carefully plotted extras.
And then in comes the hard-core gamer, Isabel (Portman) who took numerous social flaws and stacked her character for combat, courage, and conviction. She doesn't quite get the point of having any social strengths in her character because she came to take names, not make friends. She's hyper-violent and probably the only person in the quest who would be able to get there without heavy-handed Game Master hints.
The acting in Your Highness definitely supports this theory of viewing. None of the actors played it for camp. They are very serious as they deliver the most absurd lines or even feast at a medieval table on snow peas and fish fingers. Portman, in particular, keeps a wonderful commitment to her roll, even when her alliterated lines take a turn for the filthy.
The movie is good-looking and the music is great. The visual effects, for the most part, are effective. There is one Portman fight scene where she's flying around fighting a monster and I was reminded of the troll in the dungeon of the first Harry Potter movie (it was bad). The puppeteer for the wise-wizard wasn't that great either, but I have a feeling that was more of a send up to the old Henson films like Labyrinth than an honest attempt at a cool effect.
The fights, even where the effects failed, were all fantastic. They were few enough that you cared about the characters and didn't space out. They were paced and easy to follow. The characters all had a fighting style that suited their personality and skill.
The bottom line of the review is this: If you pay any attention to the opening credits, you should know what you signed up for. It is a stoner comedy. Too many reviewers review every movie by the same standards. 300 doesn't have the same goal as Black Swan and they should not be compared. Your Highness was a low-brow stoner comedy and as that, it was successful.
If I was going to give it a rating on Netflix, I'd be between a 3 and a 4, so we'll say 4 stars so long as you don't have delicate sensibilities about sex jokes and drugs. If you don't want to hear perversion, don't see it. It's as simple as that.
Final Score: B
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