Your Highness (2011)

Weed + Swords = Kind of fun.

Your Highness is about a wayward prince (Danny McBride), his slightly less wayward brother (James Franco) and a warrior princess (Natalie Portman) out to save them from themselves. The blue-blooded slackers embark on a quest to save their father’s kingdom from doom, encountering sorcerers, dragons and Zooey Deschanel along the way.

If you think it’s been awhile since the last “big” stoner comedy, well smoke em if you get em for this film that reunites some of the crew from Pineapple Express. Trust me, it’s not that funny.

The one thing about most stoner comedies is that if their funny if you aren’t baked, because no matter what, everything is almost going to be funny when your high. I went with my good friend Bill who smoked before seeing this and he had a good time, he just didn’t think the weed really did anything for him, and he wished it was actually a lot funnier for non-smoking, and smoking members of the audience. I couldn’t have said it any better.

Most of the dialogue is improvised so therefore from all of these raunch kings we get a lot of swearing, dick jokes, homoerotic gags, and barely any medieval dialogue. I thought most of this was funny and I chuckled at it, however the jokes were pretty in-your-face about it, and it kind of got annoying. Many of the jokes actually could have been better here too if they actually wrote some of them down, instead of just letting this cast just curse non-stop. Honestly a curse word, when used right, is very funny. However, if you keep on doing it all the time for laughs, and putting one in almost every single other sentence, it becomes an annoyance and just makes your writing seem lazy.

Writer/director David Gordon Green of Pineapple Express, does a good job here of making believable set pieces and adding a lot of fun action here too keep us entertained. My main problem with this film is that he doesn’t keep our full attention on this film, and I really did find myself lost within a lot of dry spots where barely any comedy was happening, as well as any action. Maybe, just maybe the special effects could have been a little bit better too, but that’s just me being nit-picky.

The cast for the most part is pretty good. Danny McBride is hilarious here as Thadeous and brings out the most humorous and well-deserved laughs. His character seems like the only real human here, and McBride has the signature “real guy” attitude that has us believe that. James Franco plays Fabious who is very funny here saying outrageous things, while keeping a straight face. Natalie Portman is also pretty bad-ass as Isabel, and although she isn’t do anything remarkable here, Portman can still show she can play that bad, sexy type well. Zooey Deschanel actually received a top-billing for this movie but is underused and I feel like they could have used more of her quirkiness to really benefit this film. Others in the cast that do a fine job are Justin Theroux, Toby Jones, and Charles Dance.

Consensus: There are moments where you will laugh, and the action with the cast will have you enjoyed, but the non-consistent laughs, as well as the problems with the screenplay (if there is one), make this a slight fun, unmemorable stoner comedy that you’ll have some fun regardless of being baked or not.

5.5/10=Rental!!