Your Highness | Re-view

What happened to David Gordon Green? Just ten years ago, he seemed the most promising young filmmaker in America. That’s not hyperbole: Great careers have been launched with lesser works than his George Washington, that bittersweet paean to long summers, early romances and the mysterious natural wonders of the Deep South. Here was a first-time director who could see the common ground between Charles Burnett and Terrence Malick. How do you go from that to jokes about severed minotaur penises?

Your Highness, which comes to VOD, DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday 9, is a new low. DGG’s career trajectory was on a downward slope almost from the start; George Washington is, after all, a pretty hard act to follow. But it wasn’t until 2008’s Pineapple Express, when the filmmaker made his first foray into frat-friendly stoner comedy, that his true aspirations became clear. Who wants to hang out in the sweltering heat with a bunch of preteen urchins when you can smoke a bowl with Seth Rogen instead?

A palpable air of just-goofing-with-the-guys frivolity permeates every frame of Your Highness, a fantasy spoof so moronic and inept that it makes you long for the ramshackle poetry of…Pineapple Express. The real auteur isn’t Green, but Danny McBride, the director’s old college buddy, who cowrote the script and stars as a kind of distant ancestor of his Eastbound & Down character. The slovenly black sheep of a royal family, McBride’s medieval fuckup lives in the shadow of his warrior-prince brother (James Franco, in glazed-smile doofus mode). When a virgin maiden (Zooey Deschanel) is kidnapped by an amorous sorcerer (Justin Theroux), the at-odds siblings embark on a rescue mission.

Your Highness was shot in the rolling pastures of Ireland, which seems a long way to travel just to play dress up with your friends and crack dick jokes. Most of the supposed humor stems from McBride and co. punctuating their phony, old-timey vernacular with curse words. That, and a deep well of gay panic. There are gags here about effeminate manservants, ass-raping monsters and a ganja-smoking puppet with a preference for young boys. Casual homophobia is an unfortunate staple of Apatow-era comedy. Rarely, though, has that element been the driving force of an entire movie.

Save Theroux, who gets off a couple of well-timed zingers, the cast is completely wasted. It’s the ladies who fare worst. Deschanel, with whom Green worked in his lyrical sophomore effort All the Real Girls, has little to do here but cast withering looks at her diabolical abductor. And long after you’ve forgotten that she’s even in the film, Natalie Portman shows up to deliver one of her patented I’m-above-this-awful-material-and-know-it performances. She’s saddled with an iron chastity belt, a gag McBride lifts wholesale from Mel Brooks’s much-funnier Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

So where does Green fit into all this? Aside from a couple of self-parodic, ’70s-style zooms, his presence in the film is basically invisible. The director seems to be settling quite comfortably into a long career of making anonymously dopey studio comedies. (Next up: The Sitter, with Jonah Hill as a beleaguered baby-sitter.) Not so long ago, Green seemed the spiritual heir to Malick. These days, he’d be lucky to get called the next Tom Shadyac.