Your Highness (2011): ***
Directed by David Gordon Green
Your Highness is a comedy. It made me laugh. There ya go! Mission accomplished. Anybody looking for anything more out of this movie will be incredibly disappointed. It is not really a good movie at all. But I found it thoroughly enjoyable and funny.
Some things I really enjoyed:
The horrible, horrible, fake British accents, particularly James Franco’s, were an added source of comedy in almost every scene. Especially contrasted with the actual British actors and Natalie Portman’s perfectly serviceable accent.
Zooey Deschanel as the princess in distress puts a really fun spin on her character. She’d been raised her whole life in an isolated tower (like princesses so often are), so when she gets out into the world she has no concept of social norms. Watch her try to eat. Or dance. Very funny comedic acting.
A villainous wizard/chieftain controls a giant hand-shaped monster by dipping his own hand in a cauldron full of mustard.
All the shtick with the mechanical bird. A great parody of Clash of the Titans (1980)
How completely ineffectual the villain is when it comes to knowing how to de-flower a virgin.
And so on.
Y’know, the movies that Your Highness reminded me most of is Cabin Boy. They’re both weird, anachronistic epics about a horribly unsympathetic main character with weird, juvenile humor and a complete disregard for anything resembling good movie-making techniques. And I dearly adore Cabin Boy. Your Highness is not nearly as good (or as creatively weird) as Cabin Boy, but it is funny. It’s kinda like a cross between Cabin Boy and Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
There’s really not much more to say about the movie other than listing other things that I thought were funny, because that’s really all the movie was; a bunch of things that I thought were funny. I know that Your Highness is not going to be everybody’s cup of tea. It’s extremely juvenile and, let’s face it, pretty durned stupid. But it’s a comedy that consistently made me laugh. There ya go!