One Minute Review - Your Highness or Why Stoner Comedy Can't Work

There is no such thing as a "stoner comedy." There are comedies about people getting stoned and there are stoner movies, but stoner comedy is impossible because it takes away the element that stoners love so much in there movies: that they are ridiculousness played with utter seriousness. For example:



David Gordon Green's Your Highness, an abysmal film that tries to be both funny and stoned, fails on exactly that principal: It tries too damn hard to be funny. If anyone should be able to make a stoner movie, it's Green who made 3 poetic indie masterpieces before making one of those great comedies about guys getting stoned in the form of Pineapple Express.

One of the main instigators in Your Highness' awfulness is co-writer and star Danny McBride, who has found success on HBO but has always been one of the most repellent aspects of any movie he's appeared in. His comedy is broad and utterly juvenile, without wit or nuance, and is delivered by McBride himself with the winking encouragement that we should be watching just how funny he is being.

The special effects, as horrible and 2 dimensional as any other $50 million movie, also don't help. They are so horrible that they draw attention to themselves as being computer generated. Much more inspired is a scene that involves a real puppet character who's eyes, somehow, actually look to be glazed over.

There's one brilliant, hilarious, moment in this film however. It's one where you understand why Green was the man for this job and how, with better material, could have made a fantastic, cheap, cult movie. It starts off with a wedding, performed as a musical number and ends, in sweeping, beautiful, Green fashion, with a stoned Mcbride running through a field of sheep.

It takes a lot to not make a stoner happy. Your Highness manages to do that and then some.