Your Highness is Like a Joint Rolled With Graph Paper
April 8, 2011
http://www.ugo.com/movies/your-highness-review
If your favorite part of Lord of the Rings is Bilbo and Gandalf puffing on "Old Toby, the finest weed in Southfarthing," well, have I got a movie for you!
Your Highness may very well be the first film to take a Cheech and Chong-level love for getting stoned and place it square in the middle of a legitimate sword and sorcery quest. Wizards, maidens, unicorn swords, labyrinths and bloodshot-eye humor are packed firmly into a bowl, ignited, and, by some miracle of alchemy, transformed into something that is very funny and, by and large, exciting.
Danny McBride, further cementing himself as the slacker child of Bob Hope and Larry the Cable Guy, is the Kingdom's second prince to a noble, Errol Flynn-ish James Franco. Whilst Franco is off on a quest, McBride is sulking around the castle humiliating his manservant Courtney, played with wonderful "Kif"-ness by Rasmus Hardiker.
An evil wizard (Justin Theroux) kidnaps Franco's bride (Zooey Deschanel) on their wedding day, so all must valiantly go forth and quest like they've never quested before.
Your Highness follows all the classic post-Tolkein fantasy beats - a consultation with a sage, a search for a specific weapon, challenges en route, team-ups and set backs. The kicker is that, were there no jokes in the film, it actually wouldn't be that bad as a straight-up fantasy. The action sequences work and the special effects sorcery could be a hell of a lot worse.
But it is a comedy, so the evil mole in the traveling warband is actually revealed to be a strange sex organ-less creature, the avenging female ranger wishes to wear the skin of her fallen enemies like a cape while they writhe in agony before her, and the mighty, maze-dwelling Minotaur turns out to be quite randy.
The heart of Your Highness is Danny McBride. It is one thing to leer at Natalie Portman (who is having a blast leaping across rocks with her bow in hand) but it is another thing to leer at from the vantage point of McBride's decency-pushing id. He's not quite a man-child, he's simply the lazy side of all of us. He wants to be King, but if the choice is between a life-threatening quest or sucking on a pipe of glorious herbs and chilling with an iguana, he'll choose the latter. It only makes his half-assed English accent all the funnier.
McBride's style of comedy isn't zany, isn't absurdist and it isn't verbose. He'll go for a slapstick gag when you don't expect it (a fall down the stairs in an absurd suit of armor had my 64-oz Sprite shooting from my nose) and he'll tack on a perfectly ad-libbed "and sh*t" to the end of a line that acts as a perfect drum-fill. I would never classify him as a clever comedian, but an instinctual one. And it is awesome to see him battling dark magic power bolts.