Your Highness User Reviews

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Your Highness is a fantasy comedy starring Danny McBride, James Franco, Zooey Deschanel, and Natalie Portman. Based solely on that sentence, Your Highness sounds like a fantastic movie. James Franco has proven himself as a fantastic actor with films like 127 Hours, and Natalie Portman has won dozens of awards for her performance in Black Swan. Danny McBride might be a bit of an odd casting but so far he's only played douche-y side characters, but maybe all he needs is the right role. Oh how wrong you are.

Your Highness starts with Fabious (James Franco) returning home from a quest and bringing with him his Fiancée Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel). Awaiting them is Thadeous (Danny McBride), Fabious' jealous brother. Suddenly Leezar (Justin Theroux) the evil wizard shows up and kidnaps Belladonna. He has to rape her so she'll give birth to a dragon so he can have a fucking dragon. I mean if you're going to rape someone you better have a damn good reason and there's few reasons better then getting a dragon out of it.

So Fabious and Thadeous must team up to save her and apparently the world because this is one Badass dragon. Right off the bat the main problem with Your Highness is Thadeous. Well the main problem is the humor but let's start with Thadeous. Thadeous' character is mostly about his insecurity and jealousy of his brother. Fabious is the Ace, the best, top dog, perfect child, what have you. He's constantly questing and being older he is destined to become King. Because of this Thadeous has a fairly bad inferiority complex and the audience sympathizes with him because he seems set up for failure, constantly compared to his perfect brother.

Or we should. See here's the thing about Thadeous, he's an asshole. It's not so much that constantly being compared to Fabious makes him insecure, it's just that he's not willing to try. You know those reality shows about parents who can't take their “Out of control teens”? That's Thadeous at 22. He goes out screws around, gets high, then comes home and gets bitched out by dad while his brother comes home from work and shows off his new girlfriend.

In fact, I'm fairly certain this is the real story of Danny McBride. Danny became an actor because his dad was tired of him leeching off of him and his brother James, and they had to save Zooey Deschanel from being raped and giving birth to a dragon.

It doesn't help that Thadeous is played by Danny McBride. When you think of that creepy uncle in TV shows, you're thinking of Danny McBride. He's over weight, he's stupid, he gets drunk and high constantly, he hasn't cut his hair in a while, and for that matter he hasn't cleaned it either. Every time he looks at a women you can probably make a strong case for attempted rape. And dragon birth.

Thadeous isn't even the main character, Fabious is. While Thadeous is fat, slow, sad, and all around uninteresting Fabious is quick, strong, always happy even when saving his bride to be from becoming the mother of a dragon, and while he's fairly bland he's a hero. You know, like in all those fantasy stories.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned Natalie Portman. That's because Natalie Portman didn't even want to be a part of this. She only did it to fund Black Swan since at the time there was no guarantee it was going to be green lit. Which is a little ironic because she's probably the best character. Natalie plays Isabel, the last of the gold knights, an order of knights dedicated to stopping rapists from acquiring dragons. She's not really funny but she's easily the most interesting character.

Speaking of not funny let's talk about the humor in Your Highness! The title is a pot joke! That's the only joke of the movie. Literally ever piece of humor has to do in some form with pot. You know what would be funny? If these old knight folk did drugs! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLno. Remember Monty Python? Blackadder? That episode of spongebob where they went back in time? Me neither. But I’ve heard those were funny and from what I’ve seen they really were. Know why? Because there were jokes. Actual jokes that were funny. Even when there weren't jokes the situations on their own were funny.

There's a 5 minute stretch of the film that contains all the funny in the movie. Thadeous puts on a suit of armor and falls down a flight of stairs, and then he and Fabious jerk off the love child of Yoda and a jellyfish. If you didn't laugh at that this movie isn't for you. If you did laugh at that I guarantee you it's not as funny in the actual movie.

Also this is a movie about rape. Technically stopping rape but rape nonetheless. It's kinda hard to laugh when your reminded constantly that Fabious' wife is going to be raped. I mean it would be one thing if Leezar was some scrawny little twerp and the idea of him even trying to rape someone was comedic, but Leezar is a big dude, and he looks like an actual rapist, more so then Danny McBride. It just makes you feel bad for her. Even if she gets a baby dragon out of it and will probably be rich off of it. Gems just fly to those things. I have to keep making jokes about this because I'll never be able to again.

On top of this the effects are oddly cheap. They're not horrible effects but I’ve seen these exact same effects actually done better for 1/50 the price on Doctor Who. It really makes the magic scenes seem bad in comparison.

Basically Your Highness just isn't good. The movie feels like it was suppose to be some sort of real fantasy epic, but they made it a comedy to cover up the lack of budget and bad writing. Thadeous is a horrible main character and doesn't really do anything for the whole of the movie. Things just sort of happen and it never once seems to even try and be comedic. Even that 5 minute stretch isn't very good.

In the end Your Highness isn't the worst movie ever, it's just boring and unfunny. And that might just be worse.