We at Van Full of Candy are entertainment industry movers and shakers. Big shots. Fuckin’ important ‘n shit. That’s just a fact. As such we get invited to the advanced screenings of all of the biggest high profile cinematic events. People want us there, important people, they want to be associated with our awesome comedic might. We get EXCLUSIVE invitations handed to us in VIP flyer form by someone making $8 an hour while wandering around aimlessly through the bowels of Hollywood. This isn’t the kind of shit that just anyone who happened to be walking down that same street and had a couple hours free on a Monday night could get… We’re special!
So after taking our place in line, then, taking our cell phones back to the car, (because I guess it would have been too distracting to all of the other important high rollers around us, wondering which Hollywood A-lister we were thumb gossiping with through the coming attractions) and finally taking a seat in OUR CHOICE of one of the first two rows of the theater (while the “real” press got to sit in much less spine destroying seats in the other 93% of the house, or as we call them “The Boring Stuck Up Assholes Club That Won’t Let Us In Already”… section) we finally got down to the business at hand… Show.
I am often known for my brief, snap reviews of movies as we sit through the credits, soaking in all of the wasted money and time of the sad individuals whose names so proudly scroll before us like they have anything at all to be proud of. And to get us started here was that snap review:
“I’ve never seen an eighty million dollar dick joke before.”
To be fair, I don’t know that this dick joke cost EXACTLY $80 million (since I can’t find the budget figures anywhere online), but it felt like it. So… congrats?
By now you’ve probably been stabbed in the face repeatedly by the “hilarious” trailers for “Your Highness”, the latest alleged pot comedy from the smokers of Hollywood’s most exclusive pots. Naturally, through the innuendo and targeted marketing of this buried in early April for good reason action comedy adventure doesn’t know what it wants to be, romp, one enters with certain expectations. Those expectations being another round from the twenty first century Cheech and Chong group following up their “success” in “Pineapple Express”.
The stoner movie has made a big come back in recent years and they just keep getting bigger and bigger with the more success they have. And there in lay the problem. With “Pineapple Express” they decided to try to advance the idiot buddy action comedy and for some weird ass reason, try to infuse some sort of spine into it. It was mildly humorous because we hadn’t exactly seen that before. But now we have, and among the many reasons “Your Highness” fails is because of their previous success.
I would have respected this movie more if it HAD just taken an old Cheech and Chong script and “reimagined” it with olde English dialogue. But they even managed to disappoint in making a weed movie.
This randomly assembled pile of insults to anyone who gives money to it, spends a hundred minutes of your life wishing like hell that it was something else while not really being sure exactly what that something else would be. My only guess as to how this script came together is that sometime back in 1994 the producers of “Your Highness” picked up a bland, regurgitated sword and sorcery story, forgot about it, then found it again in the bottom of a drawer somewhere and decided to just start filming it and let Danny McBride riff for a couple minutes every twenty pages or so. It’s like the people behind this movie went to see the new “Clash of the Titans” last year and thought, “You know, this is certainly a fantasmically exhilarating motion picture extravaganza, but I think what would truly make it a master piece is if every character ended each of their lines with ‘fuck’.”
So it’s a stoner comedy that will disappoint stoners. It’s a fantasy epic that will disappoint nerds. It’s a motion picture that will disappoint those with the gift of sight. And it’s a talkie which will make anyone curse the invention of the spoken language. A rare Spring Block-keeper-in-tacter that doesn’t have a little anything for no one. Huzzah!
It could have been so much better, but I had a pretty fun time with this cast and the humor, even though I do feel like a lot of it was too centered below-the-belt. Good review, check out mine when you can!