Your Highness

Your Highness
Starring: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel and Justin Theroux
Rated R
Director: David Gordon Green

Prince Fabious’s bride is kidnapped by the evil warlock Leezar, together with his less than heroic brother Thadeous they embark on a quest to save her and rid the land of Leezar.

Your Highness harkens back to the days of yore or more precisely the early 80’s when every other movie on HBO was a cheesy fantasy epic that involved saving a princess from an evil wizard ala Beastmaster and Conan. Add to the mix a script by McBride and Ben Best (EastBound & Down, and the underrated The Foot Fist Way)
And you have all the ingredients for comedic gold. Sadly having an excellent pedigree and a great cast is not enough. Wildly inconsistent, the pacing is just a bit off, going long distances between laughs. At times you don’t know what the movie wants to be. While action and comedy marry themselves quite well, Fantasy and comedy is a bit trickier, Your Highness has a tough time balancing between the two worlds. There a couple of scenes that push the limits of good taste and that is when Your Highness has the most success. The Wise Wizard and the Minotaur are both laugh out loud funny. Seeing Mcbride run around with his new “trophy” is a sight that will be remembered for ages.

Ultimately anyone that would be an audience member for this has to know what their getting themselves into. This is a movie that isn’t going to have a lot of crossover appeal outside of its young male demographic. While it doesn’t possess non-stop laughs when it does deliver it really does deliver.
While I don’t imagine Your Highness crushing it at the box office it is the type of movie that will gain a cult following on DVD. This is the type of movie that you watch in the Theater and probably won’t like that much, but on repeat viewings will grow on you like a bad fungus and get better and better.

Rating-72