Your Highness

Time for some strong homoerotic overtones.

"Get your quest on."

Hey y'all, welcome back to The Tagline, it's another exciting week filled to the brim with broken promises, broken dreams, and mediocre movies I watched while I was spacing out after work. Today I will be continuing the trend I started last week by reviewing a movie that was both vulgar and stupid. Today I will be dipping into the robust film pool that is the career of Seth Rogan's boyfriend, James Franco. That's right, I'll be talking about Your Highness, a film starring Franco as a probably molested prince of considerable heroism, and also kind of homoerotic stature, named Fabious, who often goes on adventures to kick ass with his shifty clearly going to betray him later knights. In comparison, his brother Thadeous (Danny McBride, who like Franco was in This is the End) is a drunken, lascivious boor, who travels around the kingdom participating in debauchery with his servant Courtney. All this fuckery ends however when Fabious returns to his father Tywin Lannister (no I'm not kidding Charles Dance is the king) with a ditsy girl he saved from imprisonment in a tower (Zooey Deschanel) that he intends to marry. Thadeous gets super jealous, because he is a stupid asshole, but before the wedding can finish, the evil wizard Leezar shows up to kidnap the girl, so he can bone her and she will give birth to a dragon that he will use to kill everyone because he's a huge asshole. With his fiance kidnapped for nefarious ends, Fabious sets off after her, and Thadeous is forced by their father to tag along, even though he is a craven moron.

I mean at least the costumes are pretty okay.

Along the way, they run into the mysterious and not super nice Isabel (Natalie Portman), who also wants to kill Leezar, for her own unrelated reasons (well mostly unrelated). Together the group first ventures forth to try and find a magic sword that is capable of killing Leezar. Before they set off though, they must first jerk off a creepy old wizard guy, who gives them a magic compass. No really they have to give a landjob to a wizard gremlin, it was pretty gross, and probably also he molested Fabious. That is basically the tone of the entire movie, it is roughly as stupid and crude as Thadeous is, and also approximately that ridiculous. That being said, it is not without it's high points, like being stupid and also very crude. Also Zooey Deschanel is in it, so you can look at her being pretty and just kind of enjoy that while all the other stupid stuff is happening. If you like Natalie Portman for some reason, well you get to see a lot of her so I guess that is nice for you, I wouldn't know. I don't like her in Thor, and I still haven't forgiven her for the part she played in Revenge of the Sith. I might never be able to put that hurt behind me.

That IS a pretty sweet sword though.

ANYWAY while super stupid and often gross, this movie is one that I watched and felt bad for actually finding kind of funny. Because the traditional sword and sorcery film is full of cliched tropes and also ridiculous camp, this movie is rather apt in its unceremonious treatment of the genre. While I enjoy a good fantasy quest, the genre is packed to the gills with egregious crimes against film (remind me to talk about Deathstalker sometime, those films are fucking golden) that I can't say that some serious films were not almost as ridiculous as this one, maybe with fewer masturbation references I'll grant but still, about as dumb. Certainly this movie was a lot less shitty than say Eragon, which scarred me in a lasting and tangible way. I'd much rather watch Danny McBride wear a minotaur cock as a trophy around his neck after slaying it. That's how bad Eragon is.

As you've probably guessed, he's about to get hurt.

Ultimately though, even as a funny spoof, this movie was pretty forgettable. It falls into that category of movies you watch out of boredom, and then definitely forget about because they just weren't that memorable. There were some funny moments, there were some gross out moments, but nothing especially clever or memorable. If you are the sort of person who always needs something in the background, this could probably suffice. Otherwise you can probably do better.

That's it for today, and that's it for this year! Join me when I ring in the new year wrong, with a movie that maybe won't involve spanking the monkey.