Sucker Punch/Your Highness

Well this week I saw two films specifically because the box office performance was so bad I wanted to see them before they got pulled from the theaters. Even in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews I strode into the viewing experience with some hope they wouldn't be complete wastes of times based solely on my enjoyment of the filmmakers' prior work. I went 1 for 2 (or more accurately .75 for 2).

Sucker Punch

Unlike a lot of people I kind of enjoy Zach Snyder's work. I thought 300 was a lot of fun and Watchmen, while flawed, was interesting. At the very least he has unique visual style that I figured would keep me engaged even if the film sucked. It most assuredly did not. Sucker Punch is more than anything, incredibly boring. There's a lot of scenes where you can see Snyder trying so hard to make things look 'cool' that the effort is practically bursting off the screen. Generally when you have to work that hard to be cool, you fail (trust me, its how I spent my high school experience). Snyder spends all his time trying to make Sucker Punch Inception- lite (most of the action takes place in two dream levels) using dragons, WWI nazi robots, nuclear bomb, and women dressed as strippers, which granted sounds cool but just fails epically here. I could go on, but I was too bored to get very worked up.

Your Highness

I really enjoyed the previous James Franco/Danny McBride/David Gordon Green collaboration Pineapple Express so I went in to Your Highness hoping for the best even though the reviews had pretty much universally condemned it as offensively juvenile. And while I would agree with the last part of that description I'm not sure its really a problem. Your Highness is first and foremost incredibly silly, and incredibly filthy, but is so good natured about it its hard to get too offended. I'm not saying its a great work of art or anything, indeed no joke is too cheap or obvious, and the plot is at best perfunctory - but I laughed. The film has the good sense not to take itself seriously (even the big shift in plot when our protagonist gives his inspiring speech is undercut by the fact that he's wearing, um, a severed Minotaur penis around his neck as a trophy) and while not all of the jokes work, enough do and I generally enjoyed myself. I wouldn't watch it with anybody who doesn't have a heightened sense of the absurd, but in general I think its better than most people are giving it credit for.