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Danny McBride is my knight in shining armor. His comedic chops and loopy characters, always with their undeserved swagger, can rescue me from any prolonged mood of supernatural dourness that might be holding me captive. His has been an advancing career of success and comedic gold that hat has been a fun one to watch. From The Fist Foot Way to Tropic Thunder, my discussions have always revolved around moments of McBride. Even with Up in the Air, I had to calm the Clooney waters with lines that went something like this, “Yeah, but did you see Danny McBride in it? Wasn’t that a great performance?” Your Highness, bringing much filthy love to the fantasy genre, is one hell of a way to celebrate McBride’s cinematic knighthood.
Sword-and-sorcery movies are in abundance these days. Yet, they’ve grown up and become much more adult and serious these days (a reflection of the times, I suppose). Their humor is gone and, while I don’t mind its absence most of the time, I do recognize the consequential pretentiousness of it all (sees Harry Potter 7). I also think there is room to incorporate a spirited romp from time-to-time in all the moments of furrowed brow. Typically, they aren’t filled with the glorious cheese like the ones of my youth (Conan, Red Sonja, Clash of the Titans, and The Beastmaster to name a select few), but I do miss the same youthful spirit that made them so … awful.
Prince Thaddeus (McBride) holds a bit of a grudge against the adventurous exploits of his brother Fabious (James Franco). He doesn’t get the attention from his father and, as a result, he doesn’t attempt to earn it. Thaddeus is content to be frolicking with his faithful manservant Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker) in fields of sheep and spells of herbal madness. When Fabious returns to the kingdom with the freshly rescued Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), who is a bit of a misfit in that she has been held captive by the evil Leezar (Justin Theroux) for so long that she has no manners and little social graces, Thaddeus decides that he cannot be the Best Man in their wedding and abandons the duty in favor of those fields of sheep and one-handed plunder.
Leezar, justly angered by Fabious actions, descends upon the ceremony with vengeance and steals Belladonna away from Fabious and his soldiers. Upon Thaddeus’ return, Fabious enlists him in their perilous journey to bring Belladonna back to the kingdom…before Leezar can rob her of her virginity and impregnate her with his demonic seed. Along the way, Thaddeus will cross swords with a fighting female badass named Isabel (Natalie Portman), a purple-skinned, child-molesting Wise Wizard, and a Minotaur from whom he harvests a souvenir to mark the occasion you will not soon forget...maybe never.
With a script that is merely outlined by Ben Best, Your Highness is a comedic work of improvisation from its cast. Knightly moments coined as ‘The Fuckening’ can only be explained by the team responsible for the royal high times, led by director David Gordon Green, and their willingness to try and do anything in a movie that aims to tickle your funny bunnies and stroke your sockets with dazzling puppetry (by Mike Elizalde and company) and special effects that simply do not suck. Your Highness will do anything to make you laugh and that energy should be celebrated – even if all the jokes don’t make safe landings.
Franco, forever the squinty-eyed stud who appears to have just smoked a bowl o’ bud himself, is not the hero; he’s the companion as this is largely a film dominated by McBride. Yeah, McBride plays the chicken – making every coward before him in the fantasy genre look every bit the King-sized material of heroes. Yet, he does have his moment of parody in the heroic journey he faces. With the help of Portman (who is hysterical in her female forcefulness), McBride gets the laughs and the empathy to make his the journey the audience cares about, but let’s not lose focus, this film is built for laughs and there are plenty outside of just the performances.
Subversive in its use of the supernatural (think Willow on acid) and offensive as hell in language, tone, and action at times, Your Highness won’t win over every audience member or critic (judging from the sheer amount of both that walked out on the screening I attended) with its penis-driven guffawing. Still, if you’re already bowled-over with laughter 15 minutes in, then you’re in good hands and ready to be rocked by the rest of the medieval hysterics. Humor in film is subjective, though. If you haven’t even twitched that tightly-sewn mouth of yours by then, well, you should simply leave the theater because it’s not going to get any better…only morally and criminally worse.
Your Highness, with a titular spin toward pot and not plot, tokes the spirit of absurdity from within a mystical bong and puffs its straight into the face of all the sword-and-sorcery films of a by-gone era.
