The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Somewhere, someone had an idea. “Let’s make a fantasy movie, but make it able to be as crude and crass as a standard comedy in order to make it really super funny.” This was a fantastic idea, with a lot of legs, and a lot of potential.

Then they made Your Highness, which wasn’t very good. It’s probably going to make it hard for someone to make something actually good off of this fine premise. It sucks, but what are you going to do?

The movie had two main problems. One, probably the smaller of the two, was that it couldn’t decide if it was a parody or not. Sometimes the dialog is playing the world very straight. It’s a fantasy world, but people have a more normal sense of what’s vulgar and how to talk. Other times, it’s trying to be a fantasy parody, trying to mimic generic fantasy speech. Although I sure as hell don’t want to watch a parody, if they had stuck with that dialog, it would have made sense. However, it constantly jumps about. One scene will be in a fairly common type of speech, and then it’ll jump to the next, where language will be heightened for no reason in a kind of parody format. It’s unfortunate.

The second, and really the main issue, was that it suffered from a problem I call the South Park Problem. There are scenes, lines, and moments in this movie that are hilarious. Many of them are in the trailer. However, when those hilarious moments are not going on, the movie is really, really painful, insulting, and stupid. South Park is like this. Good episodes of South Park are amazing. Bad episodes of South Park injure you when trying to view them. The good thing about South Park, though, is that normally it is an all or nothing affair. Either the episode is terrible, or it is amazing. This movie, however, goes back and forth constantly, and unfortunately, there’s more bad than good. The funny parts were not really worth the cost.

Seriously, there is some groundwork for a great film here. There’s actually some real world-building going on, and some interesting stuff that they did to make their fantasy world seem unique, as Essner rightly pointed out as we drove home from the film. Everything else about it just isn’t worth it. Go watch a more different film! I bet there’s one out there that’s funnier. Or hell, just rewatch Anchorman. That’s this style of comedy at its finest.