Josh Watched: Your Highness

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August 27, 2011 by Josh

Your Highness is a film I anticipated greatly, but failed to catch upon its release. I don’t completely regret missing it, then again I’m glad I finally saw it. The film is simply adequate; I came in with fairly low expectations and was pleasantly surprised.

Your Highness, for those not familiar with the basic storyline, follows the quest of two brothers, Fabius (James Franco) and Thadeous (Danny McBride), to save Fabius’ bride-to-be, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), from an evil wizard. Pretty standard stuff. What sets it apart from traditional fantasy fare is a dash of stoner antics, a fair amount of gore, and some decidedly non-period profanity. This is a film that shouldn’t have been made, much less sport James Franco, Zooey Deschanel, and Natalie Portman in the supporting cast.

It must be made known that Your Highness is less straight parody than loving tribute with a twist. Most of it really feels like something that could stand alongside Krull or Dragonslayer. This is to say, apart from the jokes, the fantasy elements are taken more or less seriously. This is a huge breath of fresh air coming out of an era where parody devolved into a mash-up of half-assed reference and lowest-brow humor. Thanks, Friedburg and Seltzer.  Of course, the fact that the film tries to straddle this line is its biggest downfall. The uneven tone hints that it could have been a fantastic parody or a pretty cool fantasy flick. It results in simply delivering a few chuckles and a minor action spectacle. In the end, I’ll still say that the fact that a film such as this even got financial backing is a triumph in an of itself. All that, and it’s not a bad way to spend a Friday night when no better alternative presents itself.