REVIEW: Your Highness

Go Fuck thyself. Funny the first time.

Your Highness feels like a bunch of smart people trying their hardest to create something really fucking stupid, almost stubbornly going after the lowest of brows time after time after time. Dick joke followed by gay-panic joke followed by tit joke followed by dick joke. I know I stopped laughing after something like 15 minutes, and it was all downhill after Justin Theroux nailed his delivery of ' Magic. Motherfuckerrrr.' Things just got increasingly repetitive, lazy and broad until the movie was over and I wanted to go home and cry into my Pineapple Express DVD. Why that worked and this doesn't is because the characters were more then just the thinnest of sketches designed for cheap punchlines, whereas here James Franco and Danny McBride grow wearisome. Both are great comedians, but its almost as if the film was more concerned with the homage then being funny or anything really, meaning they couldn't save it and its become another film that's basically an inside joke for the people that made it.

The sick joke is this film actually has a very strong cast. I don't think it will be too controversial to say Justin Theroux walks away with it, and its to the film's detriment he's not in it more. Like everything else in this movie, he's as broad as fuck but Theroux brings something to it the rest of the cast don't. Perhaps he was the only one who realized it was shit. Natalie Portman gets to kick ass, but also be dour and humorless. Not a great part really, nor Franco who looks like he's bored playing the straight man to McBride's funny-man very early. As for McBride, well he's not bad but something doesn't quite click in this role for him. He is funny, but in a muted sort of suffocated way. But he wrote it, so fault's no-one's but his. Damian Lewis shows up and is surprisingly bad-ass, making me think he should probably be in HBO'S Game Of Thrones at some point.

Your Highness reminded me a lot of Machete in many ways, so pre-occupied with being a pseudo-bad movie it eventually becomes one without the pseudo, and its just a joke no-one gets. If you have low standards for this type of thing then maybe the many anachronistic uses of the word fuck will amuse you but, jesus this shit is slender. I think its probably the most embarrassing for David Gordon Green, who I remember made the excellent Undertow. I'm glad he made Pineapple Express and it was a great movie, but I'd hate to think this is what he is now. Just a director for hire by Danny McBride, who to be honest, needs to do something different. Lazy stuff, and frustratingly disingenuous. And shit.

Rating: 4/10