Your Highness ***
Dir. David Gordon Green. 102mins. Grand Cinemas, Empire Cinemas. June 9

Movie review
From Time Out New York
Lazybones medieval knight Thadeous (McBride) would rather be getting high on primo herb than going out on Cyclops-killing quests like his bodacious brother, Fabious (Franco). But then the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux) kidnaps Fabious’s fiancée (Deschanel) to perform a not-so-nice ritual known as 'the f*****ing.' Egads, wenches, it’s time to end the mother*****r! Well…eventually.

David Gordon Green’s hard-R comedy is an ambler’s delight, never content to race so much as to linger on its crude yet benign misadventures. Despite the rescue-the-princess plot, the only thing that seems to be at stake is whether bow-and-arrow wielding warrior Isabel (Portman) will show off her perky bazoombas (only her G-string-clad badonkadonk gets some air time). Otherwise, it’s all strung-together comic vignettes - nicely photographed in widescreen by Green’s usual cinematographer, Tim Orr-hat miss as much as they hit.

There are only so many ways an actor can punctuate faux-archaic dialect with righteous modern slang (“N-i-i-i-ce!” drawls Fabious just as the action-packed special-effects climax gets underway) before the wheels noticeably start to spin. But the belly laughs do come, many of them courtesy of the mechanical bird companion who recalls Bubo from 'Clash of the Titans' or the hookah-smoking wise man who’s like a creature from 'The Dark Crystal' crossed with Chester the Molester. It’s often the peripheral sights in 'Your Highness' that tickle the funny bone as opposed to the too-easygoing ensemble - almost as if Green and his collaborators fully designed an off-kilter world, but let the people inhabiting it just wander around.

Author: Keith Uhlich
Time Out New York; April 5 2011