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After prince Fabious returns home from a quest he announces to the kingdom that he has found a love along the way and plans on marrying her the next day. He asks his brother Thadeous to be the best man. Thadeus runs off before the wedding, which does not go as planned. Fabious’s love Belladonna is kidnapped by the evil wizard Leezar and taken to his lair, where he plans to mate with here when the two moons unite. Fabious and Thadeous must go questing in order to bring Belladonna home.
Your Highness is an action adventure comedy penned by Danny McBride and Ben Best and offers an interesting look on the epic genre. They down play the seriousness and bring forth the sexual tension jokes, a lot of over the top sexually bases jokes are what Your Highness is all about. The thing that doesn’t work is that most of the great jokes are featured in the trailer so they are spoiled kind of when you see the film because they don’t elaborate any further. McBride who also stars as Prince Thadeous could have probably worked on a better script, or at least had more humour in the film than what was shown in the trailers.
There was a lot going for Your Highness based on the trailers. You have the reteaming of James Franco and Danny McBride who were both downright phenomenal in Pineapple Express. They had good chemistry again playing brothers, but it did not seem to flow as naturally as Pineapple Express did. Portman plays the most serious of characters and gives off the best performance in the film. She is well portrayed, it does not at all seem forced and Portman is right for the part. Portman seemed to fit the role of the revenge filled feisty female warrior. She could easily portray such a character in a much more dramatic setting and it may work better.
The gags and sexual humour in Your Highness grow to be rather tedious as the film drags on. There are only so many times Leezar can joke about taking Belladonna’s virginity and impregnating her with his seed. It just grows rather boring to hear the jokes with different wording every time. Belladonna is however the innocent girl who has been a hostage her whole life only to find Fabious and fall in love with him. Perhaps a different gag about her life and her innocence could have worked, but they way it was did not work all too well. Belladonna is a good character that adds to the story, but not to the comedic portion of the story. The naturally beautiful and multitalented Zooey Deschanel does a good job in the role that gets the smallest amount of screen time of all the characters. There is a funny scene early on, where Belladonna sings and it sounds beautiful and ravishing and then Fabious joins in and it is very much the opposite. This was a good joke because it played on Deschanels experience as a singer and Franco’s lack of experience singing.
As much as Your Highness tried openly to be an absurdly funny comedy, the dramatic parts and the love story seemed to flow naturally, where the humour seemed choppy and forced. It was clever to have the bumbling buffoon of a character Thadeous come into his own, that worked from a comedic stand point as well as dramatic stand point. The same old dick jokes run over and over in films have become the standard for Hollywood comedies. It is much harder to go out and write an honest comedy without any blatant jokes about dicks or sex and have it just be situational humour. There is a lot of humour and jokes to be made at the expense of the medieval quest type films, which is why it makes it that much more awkward that the only thing McBride and Best went for was the awkward sexual joke.
The natural and most rewarding jokes were the ones that were not necessarily spelled out for the audience. Probably the best joke in this film is when Fabious and Thadeous visit the wise Wizard at his home. It is so funny because you only catch a glimpse in the trailer and there is so much more to this scene that makes it awkwardly funny. I won’t spoil it, but if you get the chance, watch that scene, it will make you laugh, and the rest of the movie may not, but hopefully if any scenes will it would be this one.
It is not fair to say Your Highness is a terrible flick, the jokes are funny, and it is just extremely unfortunate for movie goers that all the jokes are in the trailer. The acting is good for a comedy, Franco is a good lead, McBride is awkwardly funny and Portman and Deschanel do a good job as the main female characters. There is a lot worth liking about Your Highness but it is the stuff that did not go right that you end up thinking about after you see it. I would say to fans of Franco and McBride that Your Highness may be worth checking out, because everyone will see it differently.
7/10
