Your Highness

Movie: Your Highness

Genre: adventure-comedy

Main characters:

Fabious (James Franco), the noble and heroic prince

Thadeous (Danny McBride), the cowardly prince who is the medieval version of a stoner

Isabel (Natalie Portman), a butt-kicking warrior out for vengeance

Leezar (Justin Theroux), the evil wizard.

Snopsis:

Fabious has just returned from yet another heroic journey.  He is preparing for his wedding, when his bride-to-be is kidnapped by the evil wizard, Leezar.  Fabious immediately plans a quest to rescue the damsel.  The cowardly Thadeous wants nothing to do with the rescue, but his father forces him to accompany his brother.  Things go bad quickly – and then the brothers  are joined in their quest by Isabel, who has been hunting the wizard for years.  Naturally, they have to brave many perils before they catch up to Leezar.

My two cents:  This movie had a lot of potential.  Unfortunately, from my perspective, someone made the decision to go for teen-age gross-out humor rather than keeping it on a little higher level,  I find movies like this frustrating because the underlying idea is very funny, but the crudeness of the humor is such that many of my friends would probably just walk out if they saw it.  For example, in one sequence, Thadeous is trying to cut the horn off  of a Minotaur to keep as a trophy.  When he finds out you cannot cut a Minotaur’s horn off,  he cuts off the penis instead.  For the rest of the movie we get to watch a large penis dangling around Thadeous’ neck.  I realize I should have expected this, especially given Danny McBride’s involvement as a writer as well as an actor . . . but I just got tired of cringing from the vulgarity.

That said . . . Natalie Portman is great eye-candy and is fun to watch beat the crap out of people.  The movie has a lot of clever humor – just a bit crude for my taste.

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