No worse than many a Hallmark TV miniseries

Looking at In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, one of his many video game adaptations that have earned him the eternal damnation of legions of angry gamers, it's hard to make much of a case for Uwe Boll being the world's worst director. He's certainly not a very good one, but this is more the kind of mediocre any straight to video hack or the odd mainstream director like Brett Ratner at his laziest can deliver than the kind of car crash awfulness you get from the likes of the genuinely dire Robbie Moffat or Timbo Hines. Presumably more influenced by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films and Ridley Scott's Gladiator than the game itself, it's the kind of derivative fantasy that feels like a bigger budgeted modern version of films like The Magic Sword and Jack the Giant Killer without the monsters. Jason Statham is our hero, a farmer called, er, Farmer. Father to a murdered son, husband to a kidnapped wife, he vows to have his vengeance in this world or the next, but preferably this, spurning King Burt Reynolds' call to arms to rescue wife Claire Forlani from Ray Liotta's power-hungry warlock and discovering his true destiny and saving the kingdom along the way.

Rather than a turkey for the ages, it's fairly watchable if you're in an undemanding mood even if a better director could have made more of his resources. There's not much in the way of unintentional laughs beyond the laughable end title songs (three of `em, ranging from amateurish renaissance fair stuff to bad heavy metal), though it's hard not to guffaw when Statham's character's real name is revealed to be Camden: you can take the boy out of London, but you can't take London out of the boy...You can see where the money (reputedly a respectable $60m) was spent, with excessive helicopter shots of CGi fantasy landscapes and armies. There is one nicely conceived effect that sees Liotta in the middle of a whirlwind of images reflecting the viewpoint of his minions, but generally Boll is lacking in much in the way of visual imagination: his signature shots seem to be tracking in on characters regardless of context or distorted panning shots and at times in the first half of the picture Boll's use of colour looks like he couldn't be bothered to grade the film properly and just went for the one-light rushes look. But in an age where orange and teal seems the default look for every other picture, being unaware of the full colour range is hardly a unique offence.

The action scenes are uninvolving and stunts rarely shot or edited to their best advantage but that's hardly unique considering how poor most modern action scenes are, and at least there's none of the excessive shakeycam or four-cuts-a-second incomprehensibility that prevents you from telling what's actually going on. The exception is the big forest battle in the middle of the picture, which manages to be both insane - somersaulting ninjas, Krugs setting themselves on fire and being catapulted at the king's army, Statham jumping over horses to decapitate Krug commanders and Kristinna Loken's army of tree-dwelling lesbians hanging stragglers from vines with a life of their own - and relatively well executed enough for it to be a fair assumption the second unit took over that scene. Like many an action film before it, it completely overshadows the film's actual climax. But the film's real Achilles heel is the casting.

Statham is okay even if he's no Russell Crowe and Ron Perlman, who seems incapable of giving a truly bad performance despite being in some terrible crap, typically good, as is John Rhys Davies, promoted from dwarf to Gandalf-figure this time round, but the casting is downhill from there. Leelee Sobieski wanders through her scenes with the same blank expression and monotonous delivery for all occasions - love, loss, anger, pride - as if she's still in shock that she's gone from working with Stanley Kubrick to a shot-in-Canada German tax shelter Middle-Earth knockoff and the smelling salts aren't working (to be fair she has a couple of more expressive moments in the extended director's cut). Thanks to too much Botox and bad plastic surgery that makes him look more like a Mongol than a monarch in some scenes, a wildly miscast and disinterested Burt Reynolds at times looks more scary than the evil Orcs - sorry, Kruggs - as he often croaks his way through his direlogue while the even more miscast Ray Liotta, dressed first like Vincent Price and later like one of the cast of Grease and looking like a demented Bizarro World version of Tony Curtis, hasn't been this over the top since Turbulence. But perhaps pride of place belongs to Matthew Lilliard, seemingly playing his every scene as the king's duplicitous nephew like he's being attacked by a swarm of bees (think Renfield on acid) in the kind of loose-limbed and bug-eyed overemotional performance that seems designed to put anyone in their right mind off ever hiring him again. It's quite possible that the only reason he's still working is because so few people saw this.

The director's cut largely adds character scenes and backstory to clarify some plot points while extending other scenes from the theatrical version. It shows a bit more ambition than the theatrical cut in places, notably in a scene wryly crosscutting both King and treasonous nephew rallying their separate armies with exactly the same speech. There's even more unsanity in the extended big battle scene, with the slingshotting Krugs presumably deleted because of dodgy effects. It tends to make it seem more like a miniseries at times, which isn't such a bad thing, though those who hated the theatrical cut will probably find it interminable. At the end of the day it's no worse than many a Hallmark mini-series and certainly quite a bit better than the SciFy Channel's atrocious Earthsea: were it not for Boll's critical bete noire reputation and his tendency to challenge his critics to boxing matches it would probably have come and gone with no more attention than something like The Last Legion.

Still, someone must have loved it (possibly the legion of German dentists who helped fund it and whose names take up 50 seconds of the end credits): despite being a massive box-office flop and not even doing that well on home video, a sequel is actually going ahead with added time travel and Dolph Lundgren as a modern-day special forces veteran thrown back in time. Somehow I doubt it'll be an improvement...

The UK DVD from Metrodome is rather problematic. The two-hour theatrical version is presented in the wrong ratio - 1.85:1 instead of 2.35:1 - and has a few pixelation problems in a few shots, though it did have some extras: 8 deleted scenes, trailer, two featurettes and a commentary by Boll that seems to lose many of the more surreal moments from the US director's cut commentary like bringing his dog into the conversation, taking phone calls about other pictures in German and going off to get something to eat. By contrast the more than half-an-hour longer director's cut is in the right 2.35:1 ratio (although several scenes feel overcropped) but, beyond trailers for other films, has no extras at all - not even subtitles.