Your Highness: Why Weren't Thou Funny?

Click to enlargeAll of the previews for Your Highness looked so promising.  Normally with a comedy that turns out this flat and unfunny, the previews give you fair warning you're about to waste a good $10 on a movie ticket.  You'll normally get the same preview over and over, because there just isn't enough material to work with.  In the case of Your Highness, there were several different previews, each one very funny.

On top of it, you can typically be forewarned of a lame comedy by the running time.  Usually a throwaway movie is barely making it to ninety minutes (including credits).  Your Highness has a running time of 1:42.  Promising!

Reality can crush the soul.   The clever editing for the previews was not there in the movie.  I suspect much of it ended up on the cutting room floor, yet still would have done little to save this bland tale of adventure laced with penis jokes, weak attempts at humor about molestation, and desperate uses of the F-bomb to make us laugh.  Because anytime you hear "fuck" in a genteel British accent, it's funny, right?

Danny McBride (Pineapple Express ) is credited as one of the main writers.  If this is his idea of funny, he needs to go back and sit down at the feet of masters.  He needs to watch Monty Python's Quest For The Holy Grail, Mel Brook's History Of The World Part I and Robin Hood: Men In Tights, read Shakespeare, and listen to anything George Carlin.  You can tell he was going for anachronistic humor, and the shock value of vulgar humor in a normally polite backdrop.  He forgot that humor still needs a framework to be hung from.  In a movie format it needs a good storyline and characters we can connect with.  Otherwise we just have people saying "fuck" without any context to make it actually funny.

Just like drama needs to break up the pace with some humor to give the audience a chance to breathe, comedy needs to respect it's counterpart.  Every time we got close to understanding these characters better, connecting with them on a personal level by learning about their understandably tragic pasts, the script suddenly shies away and  goes for a crude remark. There were scenes with Natalie Portman's character, Isabel, where she explains how she became a vengeful (and kickass) knight, but the chance to get to know her is yanked away by the writer's obvious terror of any serious moment somehow making this less of a comedy.

The acting is superb, which makes this all the more painful of a disappointment.  James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Daschenal, even Danny McBride, all give wonderful performances with the steaming pile of boring they were given. The special effects are very cool, and part of what made me want to see this on the big screen.  The lush landscapes are gorgeous, giving it that epic feel.  Everything is in place to make this an instant classic.  It's the writing that kills this.

There are too many story lines going on at once, but that I can forgive.  Many movies do that, but still at least let you get to know the characters so you feel sympathetic to their plight.  Even the promising, but less than it could have been Krod Mandoon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire series understood this.  The lead character was likable, and even though the humor was often vulgar, it was well placed, and not the crux of the whole venture.  Your Highness' Thadeous, played by Danny McBride, is very difficult to like at the outset.  I suspect mostly due to editing towards the end, you don't see this character develop into anyone you wouldn't enjoy seeing hung by dwarves, which makes the ending even harder to swallow.

Overall, this was more soul-crushingly disappointing than anything else.  The movie didn't suck.  It didn't blow.  It just sort of laid there and thought of England.

Thor: Hammer Of The Gods: a.k.a. "Thor: Swing And A Miss"

[/caption][caption id="attachment_1068" align="alignnone" width="95" caption="This is NOT Thor!"] This is what Thor SHOULD look like...

When I think of Thor, I think of a strapping Viking who laughs in the face of danger, has a lust for life, and is generally a bad ass worthy of wielding a gift from the gods. Instead we get a young, chubby-cheeked whelp who hurts his knee when he swings his sword at an enemy and misses, and then hobbles around nursing it, who whines about how he can't possibly be destined for the heroic things he sees in his visions, and makes me want to send him to his room until he can be a big boy and not cry about everything.

Okay, I exaggerate, but this is not the Thor I expected. They make sure you never see him without lots of fur and armor, because I suspect he's as physically unfit as his chipmunk cheeks make me think. Okay, he's supposed to be a young Thor. He's still learning, he's not a leader yet, and he definitely hasn't obtained the Hammer Of The Gods. But that shouldn't mean he can't be an impressive specimen of a Viking, that he shouldn't have command presence, and that he shouldn't be able to shake off bumping his knee without making a show of it. I don't know how Zachery Ty Bryan (formerly of Home Improvement) got the part, but he doesn't fit, and it ruined what little else this movie had going for it.

The whole plot is convoluted, as well. It's like they started off with one idea, then decided, no, that won't work, let's make it be this, instead, but don't bother rewriting anything, just zig instead of zagging. And then they did it again about two thirds of the way into the movie. So by the end I just summoned up my own Norse heritage as a call for strength, and suffered through what should have so very, very cool.

The story starts off with a group of Vikings landing at what they believe to be undiscovered land. Shortly in a wolf monster takes one of their crew who went scouting with Thor. They venture deeper in, all the while discussing various visions that Freya, the wife of the leader, sees. They also put up with Thor nearly fainting when he starts seeing visions of a great warrior wielding a mighty hammer. Then they discover survivors in a cabin who tell of more wolf people, and beg they leave this place. Instead of taking that as sound advice, our Viking group sets off to find their missing comrade. That's when the wolf men start picking them off more quickly. Somewhere along the line we discover the wolf men are really shapeshifters, minions of Loki, and that Loki guards The Hammer, which was used to slay his brother, a serpent demon, so long ago. After a betrayal you could see coming a mile away, and a predictable character death, we're introduced to another mysterious survivor, Vali, that we never learn the purpose of. Is he there to take The Hammer? Is he there to help? Or was he just an extra character thrown in because they ran out of ideas? By the end I didn't care, other than it was over.

The graphics of the wolf men at least were decent. There wasn't a lot of gore for the sake of gore. And the main representative of Loki's minions does the whole evil and manipulative thing with a lot of style, and is probably the only character I liked. She delivered her lines with a passable accent, but didn't overdo it, and wields her twin blades in the inevitable fight scene with surviving Viking warrior women with panache. Sadly I can't locate any information about her character on this movie's IMDB page.

There are too many problems with Thor: Hammer Of The Gods to make it passable, even by my standards. Between the lazy, wandering plot, the dialogue relying on tons of 'By Odin's Beard!' and other such stereotypical Viking-expected exclamations, and the mostly lackluster acting, it's boring at best. If they'd stuck to one storyline that would have helped. If they'd cast the lead properly, and not given us a Thor that just needs a hug, that would have been even better.

Meltdown: Days Of Destruction-a.k.a. "Lukewarm: Careers On The Back Burner"

The most lukewarm movie about heat you

Meltdown: Days Of Destruction is a disaster flick that follows pretty much every formula, including ones that make it bland, predictable, and completely forgettable. Poor Casper Van Dien is the lead in this endurance test, and while he's still got that certain something that makes me watch him, it's not enough to carry the heavy load of a plodding, hackneyed plot.

He plays a cop with an ex-girlfriend who didn't bother to tell him he was a father until his little girl (now eighteen) was five and already hating him. He also has a current girlfriend who's there just as a placeholder while the world falls apart and everyone realizes how important family is. The daughter naturally has an ex-con boyfriend a little too old for her, bringing down the ire of mom and dad, and gives us trite conflict that all resolves neatly.

We meet a scientist at the beginning who gives lots of dire warnings about how we really shouldn't be firing rockets at asteroids in space. Seems like solid advice, which comes to fruition when the asteroid breaks into three pieces, and the largest one skips across the Earth's atmosphere like a rock on a lake. The scientist turns out to be the brother of the new girlfriend, and so they all end up tagging along together.

There's a lot of useless setup to show what a good cop Van Dien's character is, which is all for naught as chaos ensues. Two days into the crisis the government lets the public in on the secret that yeah, the temperature is rising, and guess what? It's going to keep rising, and we're all gonna die. Let the riots and the looting begin!

For some reason everyone is trying to get to the airport, even though it's clear that vehicles aren't doing well in the heat, and are, well, blowing up. But these supposedly smart people are convinced an airplane landing at a specified time will get them all safely to the North Pole. Okaay... Why not? It's not like there's any logic to the rest of the movie.

Because they ran out of plot points in the middle of the movie, a dirty cop conveniently stumbles across the group, and kidnaps the brother, since the brother is the key to getting on the plane. We get gun battles, lots of scenes showing how cruel we are to each other in a crisis, unless you're the lead characters in a disaster movie, and road warrior style retro-fittings of refrigeration units on cars in less time that it took to get my oil changed last month. We also have to put up with lots of discussion about everyone's feelings, which made me feel slightly naseous.

To save you the terrible headache and craving for whiskey, I will now provide ending spoilers. You have been warned, and I emphasize I am doing this to help you, not hurt you.

At the end we get more gun battles, the North Pole-bound plane exploding in mid-air (which we don't get to see because they used up their budget on something, we just don't know what), and a completely ludicrous self-healing of the earth's orbit. It was mentioned earlier that the earth could just realign itself in a few days, and we'd know because it would start raining. So of course after the bad guy is dead, the dad and the new boyfriend have bonded over shooting people, the old girlfriend and the old boyfriend get back together leaving the new girlfriend to step aside all noble like because 'they belong together', and remaining bad guys have scampered off, what do you suppose happens now?

What's that sound? Oooh, oooh, oooh! It's rain! Rain! Our crops are saved! Although not really because they neatly skip over how much the world has gone to hell in a hand basket and the worst is probably still to come as everyone tries to rebuild and grab power and fight over the limited resources left behind.

But it's all okay. Something good does come out of it. The movie is over, and we never, ever have to watch it again.

I Am Omega: a.k.a. "This Is A Waste Of Time And Space"

Get him! He might star in a sequel!

This. Was. Terrible. Point, shoot, bang, it needs to be dead. Please, please, please to the powers that be out there, do not make a sequel like you set up for. It's not worth it. This first film wasn't worth it. I understand you were just trying to trick people into watching your movie first by rushing it to completion and releasing it before the big blockbuster, I Am Legend. Let's leave it at that, shall we? You've inflicted enough pain on my tender psyche.

Why did I even bother to watch I Am Omega? I knew it was going to be a zombie flick, and I've never enjoyed zombie flicks. But I thought, maybe with the obvious plot lifting of The Omega Man and The Last Man On Earth and I Am Legend that they could cobble something together that would keep me interested. Instead, it just proves that I still haven't acquired a taste for zombies, and that no one bothered to try to tell a story here.

It starts off with a lot of promise, with Mark Dacascos playing Renchard, presumably the last living soul. Through some unobtrusive flashbacks we learn he lost his wife and child to the virus and resulting zombie overflow. He eats his meals with a mannequin for company, pays cash to corpses when he takes their beer, and has a very intricate security system to fend off attacks. He's also going a wee bit nuts, and plays it well. Sadly, this isn't enough to hold up the story, and I found myself checking how much time was left less than thirty minutes into it.

Somehow his computer still works and connects well enough to the internet to receive incoming video. We see that there is at least one survivor in the middle of New York City, and she wants him to come get her. He wisely decides he's better off holed up where he's at, especially since he's wired the city to blow up, and ignores her.

Enter two psychotic soldiers in a dirty white van. They ask him to help them rescue the girl, because her blood has the anti-virus to save humanity. When he still says no, they insist by blowing up his house. So off they go to rescue the damsel. They don't get far before their stupidity kills one of them off, and the survivor of the pair won't leave the body to continue the mission. Renchard has to go in alone to get the girl.

It gets more ludicrous and confusing from there. The writers just throw in more zombies, cars that won't start, a girl with an oddly superior attitude for someone getting rescued from zombies, and the surviving solider going more than a little over the cuckoo's nest, all in the name of stretching this painful test of endurance out to the requisite time requirement.

At another point I swear Renchard is going zombie, because they show him getting scratched, and then he gets shot. Almost immediately they put on a thick layer of pale makeup on him, and do weird camera angles. As he fights off the now bad-guy soldier they continue to flash on him as if he were using zombie strength. Then after all that, nothing. This may sound like a spoiler, but seriously, I'm saving you a good ninety minutes of pain by letting you know upfront that Renchard won't go 'native' at the end. Perhaps knowing that you won't feel the compulsion to waste time on this.

This movie has the same intellectually degenerating impact as chugging one of those huge 40 ounce bottles of Olde English from back in your college days. You'll end up feeling about as queasy and guilty the morning after, too.

King Of The Lost World: a.k.a. 'Poor Bruce Boxleitner'

No one in their right mind wants to be king of this...

Dear god, this isn't even worth the $7.98 price tag I see at Amazon. Supposedly based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, The Lost World, it introduces a giant gorilla right off the bat, which apparently isn't even in the book. It at least looks cool, but the glimpses we get of the furry guy are few and far between, and pretty cheap CGI, even for a B-movie of this 'caliber.'

They twist the story around by having planes crash land like flies hitting a bug zapper as soon as they enter the air space. In the original tale people arrive there quite deliberately, and are able to leave. In this 'adaptation' rescue planes crash as well, you know, to add insult to injury. Radio equipment is stripped out of fuselage by the natives, presumably by other survivors trying to get out of this movie, er, off the island. So there's basically no escape, even at the very end. Truly, you feel sorry for those that make it out alive, because that means there may be a sequel.

We're promised dinosaurs and giant spiders and giant scorpions, and we do eventually get them. However we have to sit through a lot of setup to make sure we, as an audience, understand that this plane has crashed on this island, lots of people are hurt, but about half of them are willing to venture over the hill and into the jungle to search for the other half of their plane. Oh, and there's disagreement about that, but it doesn't amount to more than surly looks. And when we do finally get spiders, it's a little CGI and a lot of rubber puppets getting thrown around. It should have been funny, but the film has such a heavy overtone that the potential is lost.

Funny thing about this jungle world is that we only see spiders in one area, killer vines in another area, and giant scorpions in another. Realistically there should have been these critters all over the place waiting to take advantage of a huge cast of easy snacks. And if the Queen Of Cheese is using the word 'realistically' in a criticism of a movie, that should give you an idea of how boring and clunky this sucker was that I found myself distracted by such concerns.

There are previous crash survivors on the island who have naturally developed their own primitive, savage society, complete with a language that they must have created for whatever reason, but we don't know why, or care. They paint themselves black and white, strategically wear strips of linen, and all have perfectly straight, white teeth after eating who knows what with limited hygiene resources. They still speak English when they feel like it, but that's only long enough to let one of the wives hit on Bruce Boxleitner's character. This tribe also grabs the newest crash survivors and apparently sacrifice the half that stayed behind with the first piece of the plane, because you only see them get herded off, never to be seen again. Lucky them. The other half that ventured into the jungle must wait it out until the bitter end, like the viewer.

As is often the case in badly done bad movies of this ilk, the cast is horribly wasted. The four main characters reprising a version of Doyle's creations all do well with the little they're given, and have decent chemistry between each other. You actually hope they all make it out alive so they can go beat the living crap out of their agents for putting their name up for this. Especially Bruce Boxleitner who deserves so much better than this (and especially better than a Transmorphers 2 for god's sake). Sadly, I must put him in my You Poor Bastard category.

This should have been awesome, cheesy, and loads of fun. Instead it felt a little like Lost mixed with King Kong mixed with all of those reality shows where everyone yells at everyone else, then cries about it, then form alliances to push the other team off the island. Instead we get clunky script, dialogue, special effects, storyline, and none of the requisite cheese factor that should have gone with it. This was a complete waste of time. You have been warned.