Comedy is hard. There’s no denying it, really. What one person finds funny another finds banal. Or excruciating. Or boring. It’s easy to be dramatic, to scare and to thrill. But raising a chuckle, well easier said than done. 2011 hasn’t been a year of belly laughs, and while we’re only a third through this season’s cinematic selection, the likes of Love & Other Drugs and Gulliver’s Travels have been seriously lacking in lols, while the pedigree heritage of Paul failed to make it best-in-show. If anything, the computer-animated movie is fast becoming the de facto funny, but has yet to cater to a specifically adult audience. To that end comes Your Highness, the latest offering from the creative team behind such bawdy blockbusters as Pineapple Express and Superbad, and has its sights set on lampooning the 80s fantasy movie. With drugs. And boobies. And paedophiles. And I wanted it to be so much better.
This time round, the story revolves around prodigal prince Thaddeus, played by Danny McBride. He’s the younger brother to the far superior Fabious, which is a rather fitting name for James Franco, the (and I’m quoting directly the back-page blurb of his recent collection of short stories, Palo Alto) modern-day Renaissance Man. Anyway, Fabious bags a babe (a very fun Zooey Deschanel), but she’s kidnapped by villainous Leezar, and the two brothers embark upon a quest for Fabious to find his one true love, and for Thaddeus to find himself. Natalie Portman shows up as a Xena-esque warrior maiden, there are McGuffins to find and baddies to best. And lots of puns and innuendo to boot.
To explain the plot further is pointless, as a film like this is not about story, rather its gag rate, and Your Highness hit the mark about half the time for me. The script, largely ad lib-ed raises many a laugh with throwaway lines uttered in faux middle English banter. Verily, they manage to make the puerile poetic, and while the script lacks that certain vessel with the pestle quipping, you cannot help but be shocked into laughing. That said, none of the jokes is particularly clever, this is just risqué stuff. Just because they have the balls to play with Minotaur members doesn’t raise this above a contemporary Carry on Henry. The real fun, however, is had at the expense of 80s fantasy flicks, but not in a mocking sense, rather a hipster pastiche of how silly, yet entertaining all this can be.
Whether or not you’ll like this film comes down to your tolerance of Frat Pack comedy, the subgenre of fully-grown American men behaving like slacker college kids. To that end, let me stress it now, I do not get Anchorman nor its legions of adoring fans who quote it ad nauseum. A mentally challenged man liking lamp is not inherently funny to me. So I enter films like Your Highness hoping that with my dedication will come some sort of epiphany that all those jokes about sex and marijuana will reveal to me this holy grail of chortles. And I enter hopefully, as this sort of bawdy buddy comedy reached its zenith with the likes of Knocked Up and Superbad, which are both extremely funny movies.
Your Highness doesn’t live up to these greats, but comes somewhere in the middle. It’s fun, but largely forgettable. Really, could aim highnesser.
3 Likes.
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