Your Highness is a bizarre mixture of stoner comedy and sword and sorcery epic that manages not to be the complete disaster that it might have been but still falls short of the success that it tries to be.

Everyone is pretty stoked when Prince Fabious (James Franco) rescues Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) from the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux) and the two plan to marry…everyone accept for Thadeus (Danny McBride), Fabious’s younger brother and royal fuck up. Filled with jealousy and hurt, Thadeus skips the wedding and spends the afternoon getting high and chasing sheep around with his servant Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker). In doing so he misses out on Leezar showing up and reclaiming his former prisoner and all hell breaking loose. Enraged by Thadeus’s irresponsibility, the King forces his wayward son to accompany Fabious and his elite knights to rescue Belladonna before the lunar eclipse occurs and Leezar can complete the Fuckening, a ritual raping that will produce a dragon for him to control. Things don’t go smoothly.

When the movie first began, I felt like I was in good hands. Our introduction to Thadeus finds him about to be hanged for defiling the daughter of the king of the Highland Dwarfs (read:midgets). When he fails to talk his way out of the hanging the dwarfs drop the trap door and he lands on his feet because the gallows is made for little people I thought that the tone was well set and I was in for some good laughs. Sadly, however, while there are laughs to be had here, they are not terrible big and the whole of the movie amounts to a few hearty chuckles and some smiles.

There are plenty of amusing moments here but they just don’t go far enough and the whole thing feels much flatter than it should have been. I am fairly convinced that somewhere out there exists a cut of the movie that will make viewers pee their pants but what we have here falls a few steps short of success. It isn’t that the jokes are lazy per se, although there are several moments where pot references and the word ‘fuck’ are used as substitutes for actual jokes, but it is that there is enough cleverness to take you to the edge of quality and then fails to jump off. This is too bad because the jokes we have here show a spark of what might have been but never manifests. I never thought that I would ever say that Danny McBride’s comedy would ever not go far enough but here it is. I am a big fan of his but for whatever reason he just doesn’t go far enough here.

It is interesting to note that, despite the drug jokes and inappropriate for the material profanity gags, a lot of the humor is understated and comes from the characters’ idiosyncrasies than the situations they are in. The character’s behavior will be incongruous with what you would normally get from this sort of material and that provides the backbone of the humor here. This makes for some clever and funny moments but also demands an understanding of this kind of film that the casual viewer might not plug into. There isn’t a lot of depth in the jokes and I am not saying they are highbrow by any means but some audience members may find themselves alienated by it.

Other laughs are chased by the extremity of the gore and violence on display here. If someone is shot with an arrow, it is going to be through the throat and there’s going to be a lot of blood and chunks of gore on it. If someone gets stabbed there is going to be a lot of blood and probably some entrails. I won’t spoil what happens when a minotaur is killed but a guy has to take the trophy he has to take when you can’t cut through the things horns.

The action and special effects are pretty impressive and are almost good enough to carry the movie as a straight action adventure fantasy picture. I was very impressed by the camera moves and dynamic angles and found these scenes to be engaging and exciting to watch. This becomes a double edged sword though because I think if more time was spent honing and sharpening the comedy and less on these moments we would have had a much funnier movie. Still if we can’t have the level of comedy as we should then we might as well have decent action, special effects and gore.

The performances are strong across the board and everyone pretty much plays it straight. Danny McBride is the most unhinged and plays Thadeus as a resentful goofball as opposed to just being an all out clown. With the exception of the occasional prat fall and goofy appearance sight gag, McBride delivers his typical outlandish and self absorbed dialogue. Thadeus is a more likable character than someone like Kenny Powers and that might get in the way a little. I am not as interested in an earnest Danny McBride as I am a douchey Danny McBride.

James Franco mines earnestness as well and finds laughs in just how good of a guy he is as well as a little bit of brotherly homo-eroticism. Justin Theroux delivers his lines in a dry and offhanded way and his jokes are generally understated and hit the mark more often than anyone else in the movie. I have enjoyed Theroux in the past and he is in fine form here. Natalie Portman plays her part very straight and almost seems like she thinks she is in a different and much more serious movie until she starts delivering absurdly violent and over the top dialogue. Zooey Deschanel is mostly wasted as she really doesn’t have all that much to do besides be Zooey Deschanel in medieval peril. Damian Lewis is a standout as Boremont, a traitorous knight with a false hand as Lewis plays his character completely straight while doing absurd things.

[Conclusion 7.0 out of 10]

At the end of the day your enjoyment of the movie is going to come down to a few things. One is how much you like Danny McBride. If the answer is a lot then you will be more inclined to enjoy the movie. If the answer is not at all then you have no business watching it in the first place. Another is how much you like drug humor and fantasy movies. Finally, I think the state you see the movie in will probably also inform your sense of how funny it is. For my part, as a Danny McBride fan who is not so into the drug jokes but who is very familiar with fantasy epics and saw this stone cold sober, I thought it was moderately amusing and worth a matinee or a rental with a decent amount of potential for aging well with multiple viewings on cable.