Your Highness

Directed by David Gordon Green, Your Highness follows medieval brothers Thadeous (Danny McBride) and Fabious (James Franco) as they embark on a quest to rescue the latter’s virginal bride (Zooey Deschanel’s Belladonna) from an evil wizard (Justin Theroux’s Leezar) – with their efforts bringing them face-to-face with a variety of larger-than-life creatures and, eventually, a hardened female warrior named Isabel (Natalie Portman). It’s clear almost immediately that Green, working from a script by McBride and Ben Best, is going for the vibe of an irreverent, Monty Pythonesque comedy, as Your Highness boasts a pervasively absurd atmosphere that’s heightened on an all-too-frequent basis by the almost uniformly over-the-top performances. (McBride is essentially delivering a riff on his well-established wiseguy persona here, while Franco does a nice job of stepping into the shoes of a ridiculously earnest golden boy.) It consequently goes without saying that the film’s lack of actual jokes – McBride and Best’s idea of comedy involves period characters spouting contemporary curse words – isn’t as problematic at the outset as one might’ve feared, with the fast-paced, adventure-oriented vibe going a long way towards smoothing over the screenplay’s less-than-cohesive nature. The episodic midsection inevitably dampens the viewer’s enthusiasm, however, as the movie adopts a hit-and-miss feel that slowly-but-surely becomes more miss than hit – which does, as expected, wreak havoc on the film’s momentum. By the time the rousing, admittedly entertaining finale rolls around, Your Highness has nevertheless established itself as an affable yet thoroughly uneven comedy that benefits substantially from Green’s tongue-in-cheek sensibilities.

**1/2 out of ****