As a fan of both fantasy adventure and also goofball comedy, Your Highness struck me as a bit of a missed opportunity. With a $50 million budget, the production looks great. Ireland's countryside is beautifully presented, the music score provides the appropriate heroic tone, the mechanical creature effects look straight out of The Dark Crystal and the set dressings and costumes perfectly evoke the 80s heroic fantasy flicks director David Gordon Green set out to lampoon. Krull. The Beastmaster. The Conan movies. That alone puts this exercise in the better class of its genre, well above the likes of Ator, Yor and Gor.
The problem is the script. The film didn't really have one. Green admits that they worked from an outline and improvised much of the dialogue on the spot, rather than rehearsing and refining the comedy ahead of time. This was an unwise choice. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for instance, has an improvised feel, but was in fact carefully scripted and rehearsed, with less improvisation than people thought at the time. Comedy requires testing and refinement or else you get improvised gags that don't land followed by dead air as nobody laughs. This is Your Highness's biggest failing. The characters have little depth or interest, as the constant stream of improvised bits provide limited opportunity for interaction between them. Outside of Toby Jones and Damien Lewis who are there to play straight men, everyone else is just a joke machine. That would work better if all the jokes worked. But the quality of the comedy is uneven and some scenes just have dead spots in them, like TV sketches where the first joke fails to hit and the rest of the bit just gets awkward. Also, cursing only works as shock comedy when you don't do it all the time. Someone remind McBride of that rule.
With a properly planned script, this movie could have been a real winner. Great looking production and a fine cast, what's not to like? Well, the jokes were supposed to write themselves but half the time they didn't and the result was a few great lines and a bunch of squirmy moments. Too bad. There are a dozen or so laugh out loud moments, normally enough to carry a comedy of this length. But with so little pre-planning, the laughs come at random, with no set up or other structural support within the narrative. A skilled script doctor could have fixed this, papered over the dead air and the result might have been a minor comedy classic.
The problem is the script. The film didn't really have one. Green admits that they worked from an outline and improvised much of the dialogue on the spot, rather than rehearsing and refining the comedy ahead of time. This was an unwise choice. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for instance, has an improvised feel, but was in fact carefully scripted and rehearsed, with less improvisation than people thought at the time. Comedy requires testing and refinement or else you get improvised gags that don't land followed by dead air as nobody laughs. This is Your Highness's biggest failing. The characters have little depth or interest, as the constant stream of improvised bits provide limited opportunity for interaction between them. Outside of Toby Jones and Damien Lewis who are there to play straight men, everyone else is just a joke machine. That would work better if all the jokes worked. But the quality of the comedy is uneven and some scenes just have dead spots in them, like TV sketches where the first joke fails to hit and the rest of the bit just gets awkward. Also, cursing only works as shock comedy when you don't do it all the time. Someone remind McBride of that rule.
With a properly planned script, this movie could have been a real winner. Great looking production and a fine cast, what's not to like? Well, the jokes were supposed to write themselves but half the time they didn't and the result was a few great lines and a bunch of squirmy moments. Too bad. There are a dozen or so laugh out loud moments, normally enough to carry a comedy of this length. But with so little pre-planning, the laughs come at random, with no set up or other structural support within the narrative. A skilled script doctor could have fixed this, papered over the dead air and the result might have been a minor comedy classic.