First off it is only fair to expand a bit on a spoiler from the trailer. One of the most notable things about Your Highness red band trailer was the bare bottom of actress Natalie Portman. I will tell you right now that the scene in the movie is no more than a half a second longer than in the red band trailer and you cannot pause the film at the theater. Nevertheless, Portman in a thong for two or maybe four seconds is glorious on the big screen.
Glorious is the right word for Your Highness, the fantasy stoner film it truly is—that is to say, movies like Pineapple Express and Your Highness are great representation of the new “stoner” film, as they are defining the genre. AS immature and sporadic as Your Highness could appear, director David Gordon Green maintains a strict and tightly tied together storyline. There were two stories created for this film—one is a funny comedy starring pals Danny McBride and James Franco and the other is full-fledged medieval fantasy. The two stories cut together to create a seamless adventure of two funny talking knights, and we get only the pieces of the fantasy story that we need to follow our heroes’ quest.
What really carries the film is the dialogue—straight from a script written by McBride and co-hart Ben Best, often collaborators and writers of HBO’s Eastbound and Down. McBride’s delivery is really what carries this film through. The Sort of mish-mash of your general McBride Kenny Powers bitter offensive talk mixed with keywords and phrases you might imagine a knight or prince to have used in ye olden times. McBride’s lines play off a lot of references and medieval themes, and he will certainly catch you off guard and force a guttural laugh out your mouth. I would imagine on paper a lot of these lines would seem forced and contrived, but neither Franco or McBride give off anything but an honest to character performance. The two have a great chemistry—these actors like McBride and Rogan seem to bring out the best in James Franco.
To give you idea of how some of the humor plays out, and the subtlety to some of it—the film has a reference to the original 80's clash of the titans, to the mechanical owl that everybody loves to hate on—in Your Highness Franco has this little mechanical blue bird that flies around him like the owl in Clash. Instead of just making a direct reference or joke, they just use the blue bird straight fantasy style, actually they use it much more successfully as a plot device than 80s Clash of the Titans used the owl—and that is the joke, that Your Highness does it better.
Much like Superbad or Pineapple Express this Film has your short term goals equal long term goal frame—where you have a cast of a couple main characters who go from mini-adventure to mini-adventure meeting different characters who cameo in and then out of the film. What you can often have in these films, what is present in Your Highness, is that with so many mini-adventures they generally hit or miss, when you get a miss you basically have to wait the scene out five or ten minutes, which occurs a couple of times in Your Highness. Also there is heavy lack of guest cameo’s in these mini-adventures, it seems they mostly went for the unknown actors. While the unknown actor who plays Danny McBride’s servant boy Courtney marks an excellent performance, there are just too many unknown actors who play short- lived villains whose roles should have been filled with some fun celebrity cameos. The film, although with many A-list stars, lacks the surprise of the drop in cameo.
I would rate the film above the similar and also enjoyable alien comedy Paul. And as far comedies go, I would rate Your Highness up there for 2011 funny films, a category that is filled with mostly bad romance and pathetic buddy flicks.
Your Highness is worth seeing in theaters.