Despite
David Gordon Green's R-Rated, medieval fantasy stoner comedy
Your Highness opening in the U.S. in just two days time and anybody with an internet connection being able to read at least
a dozen reviews of the film online, I was told today by a publicist on behalf of Universal that Obsessed With Film's Shaun Munro would not be able to give his thoughts on the movie he saw last week until Sunday because of a U.K. embargo. Baffling. In any event, the movie is one that's been on our radar ever since
we loved that original trailer back in November, however the reviews from the States are trickling in now, the curtain on the movie is drawing and perhaps we were being deceived? Though the reviews aren't all negative, a split certainly seems to be forming - the bloggers love it, the veteran critics, citing perhaps that you would need to be stoned to love it, not so much. Jeff Wells' review,
titled 'Your Penis' is my favourite;
David Gordon Green's Your Highness... is so poorly written, so uninvested in genuine stoner humor (a la The Big Lebowski and Wonder Boys), and so appallingly unsuccessful that it's bit of a challenge to accurately describe it. But it's definitely not funny -- that you can take to the bank. I'm not exaggerating in calling this a landmark in the annals of crapitude and dick jokes and the fine corporate art of farting in the audience's face. It's easily one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life. But I stayed to the end! And I'm almost proud of this because everything in my mind was saying "go...escape...free yourself!"
If you only read one review of Your Highness (except ours of course!)
that would be the one to read. Kirk Honeycutt at
The Hollywood Reporter, another vet who didn't care for it...
Great screen comedies that feature a severed Minotaurs penis as a key prop are, sadly, few and far between. Your Highness aspires to such greatness but falls instead into a deep chasm of such comic lowness after less than five minutes that its unable to extricate itself. Things get so bad you half expect a cameo by Nicolas Cage. The surprises here are twofold: One is that David Gordon Green, whose early films such as George Washington and All the Real Girls showed genuine promise, agreed to direct. The other is that Green and producer Scott Stuber assembled such a talented cast for such a feeble script. The result is like watching an All-Star basketball game where everyone throws up bricks. Box office should be an air ball. Mel Brooks used to do things like this in his sleep -- you know, a spoof of a genre movie, in this case, of a medieval fantasy-adventure -- and, of course, the Monty Python comedy troupe mastered the art form. But Green is tone-deaf to comedy, so he is seriously misled by longtime buddy and collaborator Danny McBride, who co-wrote and co-produced this 'twisted tale' in which he himself would star. There is little worse in the movie world than a spoof that falls flat on its over-costumed butt, but that's what you get with Your Highness."
Marshall Fine writes, before laying in on Danny McBride's 'tired old act';
"By the logic of the script for Your Highness, if I want to write an amusing review of the film, all I need to do is type the word fuck 500 times. OK, so 250 would suffice. Not every joke in the script by Danny McBride and Ben Best revolves around the word fuck just every other joke. The rest of them rely on blood-spurtingly over-the-top violence, groin kicks, dope-smoking gags and gay jokes. Lots of gay jokes."
Scott Mendelson at
The Huffington Post;
"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."
As I say though, the reviews aren't all negative. The blogger crowed seemed to enjoy it.
Drew McWeeney at Hitfix seems to know the movie isn't great, but out of a personal nostalgia for the genre (any review that opens with... I was a fan of this and that when I was a kid is a warning flag for me) seems to give it a pass;
Not every joke lands in the movie, but that's okay. It's the sort of film that is willing to try anything along the way, and it demonstrates both an affection for the genre as well as a deconstructionist's eye for how to tear it down from the inside. There are so many little touches in the film that appealed to me, from the "Ghostbusters"-looking visual effects to the straight-faced epic second unit work to the monsters that are state-of-the-art while also managing to be both ridiculous and profane. Natalie Portman's character, Isabel, is driven by a need for revenge on what seems like a list of 10,000 names, and she plays it like she's in a serious fantasy movie. That just makes it work better, and again, it's very true to the genre. The more straight-faced she plays it, the more ridiculous things seem around her, and it really pays off the film's production values, which all is in service of making this feel like an authentic fantasy film and not a silly comedy version. When Mel Brooks made "Blazing Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein," he made sure to craft the worlds of those movies carefully and with an expert eye for detail. That's exactly why those films stand the test of time, and why they work side-by-side with the films they're making fun of, and I would imagine that if I put together a triple feature of "Red Sonya," "The Beastmaster," and "Your Highness," they would play perfectly together.
Josh Tyler at
Cinema Blend;
"Its willingness to try anything, do anything, and say anything is a breath of fresh air."
Though the odd sheep of the veteran critics seems to be
Armond White, who writes postively;
Easily the best movie Green has made since George Washington, Your Highness take on the medieval fantasy genre is essentially an adolescent visionas was the spiritual, socially conscious George Washington. But that films effete poetic sensitivity is the flip of Greens puckish Southern-boy sideembodied by Danny McBride, the appealing scalawag comedian introduced in The Foot Fist Way, a martial arts satire Green produced as if showcasing his inner-geek.
Even
The Playlist, who hate most things even remotely commercial, had a good time with it;
The potential failure of something calling itself Your Highness and being marketed, in the most blatant of terms, as a medieval stoner movie, is fairly, er, high. These are untapped waters, and a fairly ballsy decision for Universal, after several big-budgeted near-bombs, to make a big budget, very-R-rated comedy that riffs on the esoteric spate of sword-and-sorcery movies from the 1980s (like Playlist favorite Krull). In short: it could have been truly, eye-rollingly awful. But thankfully, the playful, irreverent spirit, gutbusting crudeness and general go-for-broke-ness that the cast and crewled by director David Gordon Greenapproach the material has turned, as if through magical transmogrification, a potentially messy experiment into a ridiculous, yet bold, stylistically winning genre-mash up that will leave you in stitches.
Your Highness opens in the U.S. on Friday and in the U.K. next Wednesday, opening just a few days before
Scream 4. Two movies that I'm terribly nervous about and seemingly more so with every day that passes, but I want to hope they'll be good. I must, hope.