In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

Saw In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (thanks(?) Basil) an atrocious film by noted shlock-meister Uwe Boll. The film is pretty dire. The setting is generic high fantasy with kings and orcs and elves and also boomerangs for some reason. The plot follows a farmer (named Farmer) who comes to prominence in an inter-kingdom struggle between the humans and the orcs (or krugs or whatever.)

The main villain is an evil wizard played by Ray Liotta who seems a lot more like a snotty weird loner kid (black trench coat and all) than a grand mage. The farmer is played by Jason Statham who, despite only playing stoic badasses, is cruelly given shitty pseudo-Shakespeare to deliver (he desperately attempts to rescue the situation by having his character deliver those lines ironically. It almost works, but not really.) The king is played by Burt Reynolds, trying for regal gravitas, but having to deliver lines like "what the hell does that mean?!" in an august manner. (Later on he says "Wisdom shall be our hammer, prudence shall be our nail." to which I respond "what the hell does that mean?!") The script is atrocious. If it's not actively working against the characters it's being meaningless. It sounds like someone who doesn't speak English wrote it. Emotional scenes are filled with words which seem to convey meaning, but are in fact dada-ist tone poetry. Worse however is when the script goes silent and Boll tries to dazzle us with visual effects.

There are several interminable battle scenes between legeons of cloned extras. One is set during a dark and visually confusing thunder storm which the evil wizard summons for no apparent reason. Fragile-looking human ninjas leap about, twirling their little swords very prettily but looking like one good mace-hit would take them out. Luckily the orcs seem to be so disorganized that it takes about 5 of them to kill each human (and we see several humans killed this way. Several.) The presumptive elves, who are high-wire pacifists until they suddenly aren't, dangle uselessly above the fray, every so often tripping an orc or something. During the wizard-y climax, there is a tornado of books which seems pretty cool until it becomes apparent that the books aren't actually going to do anything. They just spin for while (they don't even hit anyone) and then fall, uselessly. What was the point of that? Empty spectacle can be fun, but if that's all you're going for, Uwe, you can do better.

An utter, bewildering waste of time. Uninteresting in both an aesthetic and an intellectual sense. It would be good to watch with friends but alone it is tedious agony. Falling flat when it should soar, soaring at random and inexplicable times (burying a child, for example, takes place during increasingly up-tempo music. Perhaps our heroes are meant be shovelling faster and faster?) annoying when it doesn't mean to be, entertaining by accident, this thing is a mess. It's a kind of glorious mess in that it is marvellously, bafflingly, absurdly awful, but a mess none the less. Watch with friends. Or just not at all. Ugh.