So I finally got around to watching In the Name of the King. I busted on it a little back when it came out for featuring Burt Reynolds as the king in a sword and sorcerer flick. That's right. Stoker Ace referred to as "Your Majesty". Why of course. It's practically type-casting. I finally decided to check it out on DVD when it hit on 4 "Worst of 2008" lists. I mean, how could I not?
It's in that realm of films that can be referred to as the "Jason Statham Kicks Somebody's Ass" oeuvre. And this one could have been titled Jason Statham Goes Medieval on Somebody's Ass. Or approximately. The whole thing was that kind of vaguely European Middle Ages/Dungeons and Dragons setting, where our hero swings a broadsword and a boomerang. Uh-huh. I counted swords from five separate eras, armor from 2 continents and costumes that looked like they were picked up at Peter Jackson's garage sale. And, speaking of Lord of the Rings, the bad guys looked like creatures that were so hokey looking they couldn't even be used in Orc crowd scenes.
And that pretty much sums up the entire movie. Logic? Out the window. The plot seemed to be dreamed up by two 8-year old boys who kept saying "And then you know what would be cool? - Amazons! And ninjas!" I was lauging my patootie off. And really, that's the pure joy of a movie this bad. It can't get worse. And then it does! Like Ray Liotta looking like Liberace's evil twin in a rhinestone encrusted shawl collar chewing scenery like he's got a bad case of pica. Or Ron Perlman spouting fortune cookie wisdom. Or Matthew Lillard* playing bug nuts. No actually. That makes sense. Matthew Lillard excels at playing bug nuts. But then you get to where you have Burt Reynolds playing the king in a movie that has John Rhys-Davies - who looks like a king, sounds like a king and acts like a king. But isn't the king. Which, in it's own way, makes sense too. Because if he played the king, then he couldn't get stuck with all the exposition - "You remember, sire, years ago, you had a son who died when . . ." And of course, you need tons of exposition because the plot skips these giant things that you really need to know for anything to make sense, and then you need somebody to fill you in because you're saying "What the fruitcake is going on?" Because why make sense when you could be watching Jason Statham kick somebody's ass?
Anyway, you will be seeing this movie on the $5 rack at your local Target someday soon. And it's just about worth that for the laughs that you can get watching this movie go on the koo-koo death spiral of all time. Use the money you would have spent on a good movie to buy a jug of Gallo, and turn it into a drinking game. Every time something whackadoodle happens, you take a drink. Make that two jugs of Gallo.
* Yes, all these people and more names you'd recognize were in this train wreck. I'm kind of thinking that Uwe Bolle is either a very persuasive son-of-a-gun, or has a dozen private investigators on retainer who do nothing but dig up dirt on movie stars so that they can be blackmailed into being in the next Uwe Bolle production. Except for Ron Perlman. That dude will act in anything.
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2 comments:
I replied but it did not "take" -- my word verification btw was "matedit" - I'll NOT take that personaly. Just commented that I'll wait for SCIFi network for this and eagerly await a philosophiacl Ron Perlman - too yummy.
Oh, you know this will be a special movie event on SciFi. Perlman isn't at his best weight (I think he looks best a hair on the skinny side - at least when he's not playing Hell Boy). This is a two-bagger popcorn movie.
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