Two films lead-starring Brit action-actor Jason Statham came in through rental the other day, so here’re some brief comments on the first.:)
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007). If there’s one thing German director Uwe Boll is consistent of, it’s the IMDB ratings he gets for the films he makes. The ratings for four of his films made between 2005 to 2007 got these ratings: 2.6 , 2.2, 2.0, and 2.4 / 10. In assessment, it’s a capital F –ail. In the Name of the King is an improvement: it got a 3.8 / 10 – but still a straight ‘F’.
To say Boll’s movies are typically bad is an understatement. Australia would be the Academy’s Best Picture compared to this fecal matter. King is based on a popular video game Dungeon Siege released by Microsoft in 2002, incidentally a game I also played and enjoyed then. Problem is: the game was primarily an action hack & slash game with a very thin veneer of a story and stock characters i.e. Boll didn’t have much to work with, never mind that there was no compelling reason to turn the game into a movie in the first place.
But still he went ahead, and that a sterling cast was assembled to work with a director infamous for churning out trashy movies just make things even more surprising. Perhaps they thought they could somewhat elevate a Boll movie from trash to acceptable mediocrity.
Unfortunately, they still couldn’t. We see Burt Reynolds as the good King but you can’t help but wonder is he secretly chuckling at the foolishness of every scene he’s supposed to be serious in. Ray Liotta as his scheming mage does his characteristic mwahahaha evil laugh at every turn – which was fun to laugh in Goodfellas but in here may drive you to the kitchen looking for a knife to stab your eyes out. Matthew Lillard is the evil King’s nephew wanting the throne for himself, but is really Mickey Mouse dressed up in armor and leather.
The ladies in the cast fare just a mite better: on account that you can just mute the sound and ogle at their beauty. There’s Leelee Sobieski who famously portrayed Joan of Arc in the 1999 mini-series, Terminatrix Kristanna Loken as the Amazonian version of Tarzan that swings from tree to tree in this movie (no kidding), and the very lovely Claire Forlani who was Brad Pitt’s love interest in Meet Joe Black.
But when you’re saddled with a script that really contains just two lines of story, boring battle and fight scenes, second-grade computer graphic visuals, horrendous soundtrack music, and totally insipid dialog, what could they have done?
Speaking of dialog, there’re lines like this in the film that occurs 5 minutes into the show and between Statham and Forlani’s husband and wife characters:
“Tell me how you love me.”
“You know.”
“I only know what you tell me and you tell me nothing.”
And this particular conversation goes on too in the scene! Yep – and here you were thinking the dialog between Anakin Skywalker and Padme was bad in Attack of the Clones and the lowest point ever in films.
I don’t zero-star movies normally. But for this film, I’ll make an exception.
– ZERO of five stars.
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