Your Highness misses the mark

John Keogh reviews Your Highness and Scream 4.

Your Highness
DIRECTED BY: David Gordon Green
STARRING: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Justin Theroux
CERT: 16
When William Goldman and Monty Python have gone before you, well, there’s a certain standard. So if you’re making a medieval comedy, The Princess Bride and The Holy Grail are where the bar is set.
Which is fairly high, in fairness, but that’s how it is. With the right people and a bit of class, you could give it a shot. You might not make a new classic but you probably won’t disgrace yourself completely.
Alternatively, if you’re comedian Danny McBride, you might say, “What The Princess Bride really lacked was tons of gay jokes and dope gags, not to mention excessive foul language and vulgarity. That’s the way to do it, boys”.
And that’s what they’ve done.
Written by McBride and Ben Best, Your Highness is directed by David Gordon Green, the director responsible for The Pineapple Express, a film whose acclaim baffles me still and causes me at times to wonder where it all went wrong for the human race.
McBride is Prince Thadeous, an insecure, sheep-chasing stoner who doesn’t do the whole dashing, dragon-slaying thing, unlike his older brother Fabious (Franco), the conquering hero of the kingdom, recently arrived home from battle with a rescued damsel in tow.
When this beautiful maiden, Belladonna (Deschanel) is kidnapped by wicked wizard Leezar (Theroux), King Daddy orders Thadeous to join his brother on the great, big quest to save his bride-to-be. They’re joined along the way by Isabel (Portman), an acrobatic warrior on a mission of revenge, ­ a sexy, ruthless Princess Fiona, whose charms do not go unnoticed by the ogre Thadeous.
This adventure has its moments, most of them courtesy of Theroux’s wizard, which might suggest to McBride and his cohorts that with a little (ok, a lot) more taste, this could have been a fine little film. Instead it’s a lazy, mostly charmless hack job that goes for the lowest laugh at every chance, ­ literally in the unfortunate case of the Minotaur.
It’s only partly saved by Portman, doing a great job as the badass swashbuckler and like Franco’s näive, heroic prince, being funny simply by playing it straight.
Pity about the mess all around them.

Scream 4
DIRECTED BY: Wes Craven
STARRING: Neve
Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox, Kristen Bell
CERT: 16
Well, the good news is that Wes Craven’s brain has not turned entirely to orange jelly as we feared a few months back when we laid horrified eyes on his last movie, My Soul To Take ­ a film so bad in every way that, all around the globe, midnight prayer vigils were held for the great man’s wellbeing.
Either the prayers worked or Craven was just having a laugh all along.
In any case he’s back on better form, though not the kind of form that could wring something new and truly memorable from the Scream franchise, which peaked with the first film and should have been put down a long time ago.
In Scream 4 or Scre4m as they put it, ­ original heroine Sidney Prescott (Campbell) returns to her hometown Woodsboro at the tail end of a book tour. She’s hawking a memoir about how she recovered from the brutal deaths of her family and friends at the hands of Ghostface and how she dealt with the exploitation of the movie franchise, Stab.
She’s barely back in town when our old masked friend kicks off another slashing spree. This time the targets include Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her teenage friends Olivia (Marielle Jaffe) and Kirby (Hayden Panetierre). On hand to offer the obligatory fan boy wisdom are Charlie and Robbie (Rory Culkin and Erik Knudson), movie geeks with smart phones where their hands should be.
Old hand Dewey Riley (Arquette) is about as useful at tackling crime as he always was, even now that he’s sheriff and married to former tabloid TV reporter Gale Weathers (Cox), nowadays an author of crime novels based on Sidney’s adventures in slasher land.
If these two ­ and Sidney herself ­ had been given more to do here, then Scream 4 might have been a more entertaining effort. As it is, after an amusing opening, it settles into pretty much the same old same old, with a little more gore than usual.
Much is made of how the world and horror films have changed in recent years, but Craven and his Scream writer, Kevin Williamson, don’t follow up all the talk by bringing anything new to the table.
The ending might have a few heads debating whether it’s a great reveal, or just the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen. But if all anyone talks about is the start and the end, then someone is dropping the ball.
We must keep an eye on poor Mr Craven.