Richard's Online Journal

[19/08/08] In The Name Of The King

Ah, Uwe Boll. Much like American McGee, his name has become a warning label rather than a selling point, but that’s not about to get in his way.

I’d be lying if I said I had a soft spot for his terrible game-to-movie conversions.  Most of the time, they’re intensely boring, regardless of who or what is on screen. Boll has an utter contempt for his source material that’s only matched by the disdain the fan community has of him. They’re not-so-bad-they’re-good. They’re the movie equivalent of the toy in a McDonalds Happy Meal - rushed, cheaply made crap designed to cash in while the iron’s hot.

But the horror has only just begun…

The fact that Dungeon Siege sucks shouldn’t be any surprise. Boll is a terrible director and ruins every franchise he touches. What makes them interesting is seeing exactly how he goes about it. There’s a certain perverse genius to taking a game called Alone in the Dark and promptly let the main character spend most of the plot being backed up by a full squad of gun-toting marines. Or look at Bloodrayne. Perfect example. You’re never going to win an Oscar for a Bloodrayne movie, but you could easily turn it into a big gore-splashed, self-consciously trashy action flick. Dead or Alive did that, and while it wasn’t in any sense a good movie, it was a fun bad one.

What did Boll do? He took a game about a large-breasted vampire chick whose signature move is grappling Nazis from behind and slurping out their blood with a series of orgasmic moans… and made a period drama about it. Classy.

Bloodrayne is of course a totally original crea- oh, wait, sorry. That’s Durham Red. Don’t know how I made that mistake…

In The Name Of The King is one of the few times when Boll and gamers are on the same page. It’s based on Dungeon Siege, and nobody, but nobody cares about Dungeon Siege. Nobody remembers anything about the plot. Nobody remembers the characters. There’s more Bubble Bobble fan-fiction than there are Dungeon Siege epics. That’s including In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, aka a movie which doesn’t even have a dungeon in it, never mind anyone besieging one.

What it does have is John Rhys-Davies, and goodness, isn’t it lucky? He’s one of those actors that automatically improves any scene he’s in, through sheer force of being John Rhys-Davies. He’s one of the few actors capable of deploying his terrific screen presence no matter what he’s doing, whether it’s something great (like Lord of the Rings and the Indy movies), a mere computer game (Wing Commander, Quest For Glory IV, Ripper) or absolute crap (Sliders, Revelations, Voyager).

“My boy, I could read a shopping list and make it captivating. I gave a good performance in a Take Two interactive movie. I can survive this Uwe Boll.”

In this, he’s more or less alone. Like most Uwe Boll films, King has a star-studded cast of known actors hired for a quick job in between real gigs. Burt Reynolds sleepwalks through his role as the titular King, while Matthew Lillard leaves no scenery unchewed as his eye-popping evil nephew, Claire Forlani and Leelee Sobieski show about as much interest in their kidnapped wife/ineffective Action Girl lines as the screenwriter did after typing the words ‘in form-fitting armour’. Ron Perlman is also in the movie. When Ron Perlman can’t be arsed, you’ve got problems.

Oh, and then there’s Ray Liotta. Oh, god…

“Mad? Mad? Is it mad to pretend your Warhammer figures are an actual army? If so, just call me mad! Just like everyone else I’ve ever met!”

Liotta plays Gallion - Tomb Raider with pirates - an evil mage with two bases. The first, and do stop me if you’ve seen this before, is a muddy industrial camp where he’s churning out an army of bestial Not Orcs called the Krug. The second is a castle in a land so close to Mordor, Mordor occasionally nips over to borrow a bowl of sugar.

The rip-offs only get worse from here. He’s one of the last two mages in the land, with his main nemesis being Rhys-Davies’ Gandalf analogue. They used to be friends, but now- Oh, you get the point. His main unique thing is spending almost the entire movie sitting in a giant magical toilet bowl, controlling a constantly respawning hero-unit who I’m just going to call the Witch King for the sake of simplicity. The rest of the time, he seems to be at war with Jeremy Irons’ Profion in the terrible Dungeons and Dragons movie to see which of the two can turn in the worst performance.

I have to give it to irons here, but it’s close. You know how in The Dark Knight, the Joker had that tongue-clicking sound during conversations as his trademark tic? Gallion has a tendency to snuh-snuh his teeth like a ferret when he gloats. He gloats a lot. It’s not scary. At all. Ever.

I think Gallion got bullied a lot at school. He definitely doesn’t get the idea of being ‘flushed with success’

Anyway, all that’s for later. The real star of today’s movie is Jason Statham, who made such an impact on me with his performance, I realise I forgot to mention him back in the cast-list. He plays Farmer, a… farmer. This is explained away by a truly amazing bit of handwaving, specifically: “Your father believes people become what they do.”

Not sure what that means, but let’s chalk it up to wise words from Shit Director. Anyway, anyone with half a braincell can guess that Farmer is really some kind of scion, destined to become the king of Ehb, the fantasy world that even sounds like an apathetic shrug. This has to be kicked off with some good old fashioned personal tragedy, so it’s off to a slave camp for his wife, and a freshly dug grave for his young son. Possibly the finest moment in the entire film comes near the end, when the baddie tells said wife that she’s pregnant, ensuring that Farmer quite literally gets a replacement to compensate for this sad loss. I haven’t seen such blatant unfairness since Commissioner Gordon’s son was declared his most loved family member with his sister less than half a foot away. Honestly, these baddies. No manners…

Life was peaceful in the small hamlet of Doomed Hometownville

The ensuing fight leads to a fantastic Boll Cascade. That’s when an already ridiculous scene just gets worse and worse in the name of looking cool, without the bit where it actually becomes in any way cool. In this case, Farmer is a turnip farmer, so of course he carries a giant, unwieldy sword with him everywhere he goes. Why? Because the script’s about to call for him to get attacked by orcs, after a bit of hide-and-seek that’s not so much tension-building as reminiscent of Lancelot’s assault on Swamp Castle in in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He ducks and dives and swordfights his way past the first, then more come out of nowhere to attack him, and he’s forced to…

...oh dear…

...to deploy a boomerang. A combat boomerang. Like Gallion’s Swirling Toilet of Doom, I’ll charitably assume this looked good on paper, but on screen, it’s like a cheaper version of Xena. Those words shouldn’t even be able to sit in the same sentence, but there they are, as embarassed as the Not Orc’s Troma level costume.

Almost worse is the scene being played out elsewhere, where the yet to be properly introduced girl surprised at Liotta’s punctuality earlier is having a playful swordfight with the equally unintroduced king’s bodyguard. For such a simple film, In The Name Of The King really knows how to be confusing with its terrible editing and assumptions that we know what was going on in the screenwriter’s head while putting this nonsense together. Her name’s Muriella, but I’m going to call her Arwen, since that’s clearly what they’re going for here. First time through, I figured she was the princess or similar, but we’re eventually told that she’s the daughter of the king’s Magus, better known as John Rhys-Davies. That whole business with Gallion earlier? Pointless.

Either way, they’re fencing, which doesn’t seem the ideal form of battle-training unless they’re expecting some very polite monsters to show up. She holds her own like an actress after a couple of days’ tuition from a stunt coordinator - don’t know where I got that metaphor from - but it’s hard to be impressed. For starters, she’s fighting a supposedly elite soldier who must be painfully aware that the slightest nick on her milky-white skin will have his world’s Gandalf stamping down to fill his testicles with magical fire beetles. He compliments her on her skill, but tells her that as a girl, and a female girl at that, she won’t be allowed to join the army.

Her frozen face does its best to emote displeasure. “Don’t worry,” the bodyguard doesn’t need to say. “Later in the movie, you’ll get to dress up in some costume armour and show us backward misogynistic types exactly how powerful a girl can be.”

“I was so worried about the state of the kingdom, I only spent an hour in the spa today. War truly is hell.”

At least, that’s the theory. Instead, when she discovers the power of inner strength, she ends up the only person on screen still looking perfect instead of covered with mud and scratches, her first opportunity to prove herself ends with her desperately fleeing from a Not Orc I’m fairly sure I could take down, and in short, her only real victory at any point comes thanks to some magical friends bailing her out and almost literally gift-wrapping one of the enemies for her to take back to the good guys’ camp.

All very silly. But still a long way off in this inteminable movie.

While waiting to be told exactly what the hell they’re doing, the Not Orcs (still led by Gallion from his Toilet of Power) destroy the local town of Stonebridge for no particular reason other than to kick-start the plot. Farmer and his friends Legolas and No Obvious Analog ‘fight valiantly’, as the scripts for these things go, but fail to stop Farmer’s wife being kidnapped somewhere off-screen. They do however start the film’s real theme; that whether you’re a monster, a ninja type, or a fully Western swordfighter, everyone in Ehb fights like they’ve been trained by the exact same Chinese fight co-ordinator. Unless they’re throwing boomerangs.

The King and his entourage, made up of his bodyguard, John Rhys-Davies, and a load of extras, finally show up, but it’s too late. The King complimentes the peasants on their apparent victory, and promptly tries to recruit them into the army. The advert boils down to “Sorry we weren’t around. If anyone with combat skills wouldn’t mind signing up to join the army so that they won’t be around either next time, that’d be super.” Needless to say, Farmer promptly tells him to stick it, and heads off in search of his kidnapped wife. The King lifts a finger, his archers shoot Farmer in the back, everyone claps politely, and the entire movie ends on a realistic high.

Well, that would have been nice. There’s two hours of this crap…

The action promptly splits into two equally silly subplots to pass the time. The Fellowship of the Something (consisting of Farmer, his friend Legolas, and Ron Perlman) go in search of the slave camp by following the signs to Isengard. This takes them through some utterly generic scenery that may as well be chromakeyed in straight from Lord of the Rings. The King returns to his castle to sit on his royal arse and wait for Gallion to get round to doing something. At least Farmer gets some action, even if it’s only getting concussion and meeting some bored looking dryads in the Haunted Forest of Mild Peril as he looks for his connection to the main story.

“I just dropped in to say ‘look at my breasts’. Okay, bye!”

The dryads offer some of the film’s stranger moments - and that’s saying something. They’re clearly acrobats, hanging from unconvincing vines, and delivering lines like “Those who you fight, we will help you fight them...” when they should be sitting on the cutting room floor. Their leader is Kristanna Loken - a second-time Boll actress, after playing the lead in Bloodrayne. She was also the T-X in Terminator 3, the inoffensive cute thief in Mortal Kombat: Konquest, and probably some other stuff too. In genre movies though, her role is to be the poor director’s Milla Jovovich; herself the poor director’s anyone who can act.

(Entirely randomly, it’s my suspicion that Jovovich’s movie career is entirely based on some cadre of directors competing to get her naked for the most gratuitous reason. Luc Besson held the trophy for a while with that bandage-suit from The Fifth Element, and Kurt Wimmer made a valiant play with the Naked Security Scan Chamber in Ultraviolet. Still, the reigning champion has to be Paul Anderson for Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Just when she thought the movie was over, it was off with the robe and into a tank of water for a conclusion so hastily written, I’m surprised the ink on the script didn’t get smeared beyond the point of readability...)

Anyway. Loken’s role in this film never makes much sense. Here, she announces that her dryads have no interest in the world of men, and kicks them out. In her next appearance, she happily rescues Arwen from the baddies, and promptly decides to help the goodies out to the best of her not actually that impressive abilities. By the end of the film, she’s happily wandering the world with Farmer, until she gets left on her own on a cliff-side and is last seen slouching back home with the bags while everyone else finishes the adventure. In a word: huh? She’s actually a negative presence, because by bailing Arwen out on a couple of occasions, she completely steals her opportunity to prove herself as more than just a pampered princess in shiny armour.

I’d like to think that someone pointed this out after reading the script, but if so, nobody bothered to do anything about it. Not the first time. Not the last.

Ah, the inspiration for that Two-Face effect…

Back in what passes for the story, the Fellowship discovers the slave camp, and has to take a minute to get over what a pathetic rip-off of Lord of the Rings their lives have turned into. Farmer is quickly knocked out a Not Orc. When he wakes up, the Fellowship is on its way to Gallion’s slave camp, while he’s sitting under a tree with the Witch King, still puppeteered by Gallion. This is bad news, because now we really get to see what a pathetic villain we have on our hands. Right now, all Gallion knows about Farmer’s patently obvious destiny is that there’s something unusual about him, which doesn’t really explain why he earlier on went out of his way to specifically kill his son.

This is his opportunity to ask for details, and in fairness, he does.

While hanging Farmer from a tree.

“WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER MY QUESTIONS?!”

If he’s annoyed at Farmer’s odd refusal to talk while being strangled to death with a rope, it’s nothing compared to what happens next. Farmer escapes death not through any clever stratagem, but because the rope around his neck… just breaks. Back at the Toilet of Probable Doom, Gallion throws his toys out of the pram and orders some extra-kickable puppies from the internet. Ooh, he’s a mean one, apparently.

He shows even more pitiful tactical planning back at the King’s castle. Off-screen, he has the King’s dinner poisoned, without bothering to tell his own partner that today probably isn’t the day to join his liege for brunch. That’s dumb. The actual poison is dumber. When the King finally dies, it’s to an arrow to the chest.

Second, when I say ‘finally’, I mean ‘finally’. Of all the poisons Gallion could have used, he picks one that completely knocks the King out for an evening, making it clear that something’s afoot, but leaves him capable of riding around the country, leading his army in battle, and all manner of other stuff that could have been happily averted had his dinner just been laced with cyanide or arsenic.

Okay, the King has a mage to help keep him alive, but c’mon - that’s just more reason to take him out as fast as possible. It’s not like anyone doesn’t know who’s done it. The first thing the heir to the throne does after the King gets squiffy is to run off with two of his the kingdom’s low-budget legion legions, thus instantly implicating both himself and Gallion as the culprits. Why bother? Why not just use a dagger? Or at a pinch, the army of Not Orcs? Something! Anything! Gah!

Still, Gallion’s greatest moment in the movie comes in one of the final battles, after Farmer’s destiny has finally been explained, and the armies of Good If You Consider Kings Automatically Good and Evil face off. He casts a magical spell that makes stormclouds gather over the battlefield, lightning spear down from the skies, and torrential rain pour down on the combatants. All very powerful and scary. Until you look at the battlefield. The King’s army is on top of a hill. His Not Orcs are at the bottom. He couldn’t have handed the good guys a better tactical advantage if he’d ordered his army to stab extra-long lances up at the lightning bolts.

“Krug no want Gallion king any more. Krug demand representational democracy and suffrage for all. Krug optimist.”

Inevitably, the battle is rendered irrelevant by the Big Picture. Fantasy rules say that armies made up of soldiers are a non-event compared to whatever the heroes are up to, which means it’s time for a crack team of exactly four people to head out on the movie’s big decapitation strike in Not Mordor. How will Boll depict the sheer scale of this journey? What original visual will be plucked from his mighty toolbox?

Oh, now that’s just taking the piss…

Despite the scale of the landscapes we see them walking across suggesting that it would take them days or weeks to accomplish this, they get there pretty quickly. The team consists of Farmer, obviously, John Rhys-Davies, ready to act as Gandalf to Gallion’s Saruman, the ever-pointless Arwen, and… for no apparent reason except that she was around… Kristanna Loken. If there’s a reason to head to volcanic Mordor and a dry arid fortress with a dryad whose powers only work in the forest, it’s not well explained. At least with Milla Jovovich, they’d have had a willing sacrifice to help them get past the fabric eating fire ants of Fanservice Pass. And there would have been fabric eating ants.

The final battle for Ehb takes place in the mage’s fort, only accessible via magic for reasons that don’t make any sense whatsoever. Are we meant to assume the mages did their own cooking and cleaning? I don’t see Gallion taking time out for Laundry Day.

Yep, totally not Mordor. How big is this damn kingdom anyway? They seemed to get here overnight, but…

Rhys-Davies goes in first in an attempt to talk Gallion back to sanity. It goes well, and the movie ends on a happy note as everyone develops new understanding of each others’ positions, and the kingdom of Ehb goes onto.... uh-huh. Right.

Back in reality, Gallion channels the Joker with some nonsense about madness becoming the new power, and does his first truly successful evil act in the movie, by removing John Rhys-Davies from it. Before he dies, he has just enough gravitas left to give his remaining power to Arwen, proving that in fact she didn’t have what it took to be a hero, and never did. Even fully empowered, and at the end of her movie-long character arc, she’s barely sidekick material. But her hair is perfect, so that’s okay.

Oi! Kill the hero if you must, but leave the poor books alone. What did they ever do to you, except give you the power to kill the hero with magic? You should be thanking them. Ungrateful cur…

Farmer faces off against Gallion in a battle that resembles a P.E. teacher fighting the school librarian. The highlight is when Gallon gets knocked onto his back, only to boing up into the air like rubber. He starts with sword fighting, then cheats, then there’s more sword-fighting, and Farmer goes ‘Grr!’, and Gallion’s all like “Can you do this?” and Farmer’s…

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. The whole tedious battle finally ends when he bothers to use some of his real magic, creating a tornado of books that hold Farmer in place. Arwen shows up and sets them on fire, which is one way of freeing someone from that situation, but not, I’d suggest, the ideal one. Farmer ‘s wife stabs Gallion in the back, but not enough to stop Farmer himself landing the final victory blow. As Gallion dies, his army of Not Orcs immediately lose interest and amble off back home. Two hours late, but what can you expect? They’re dumb creatures.

And that’s about it.Farmer wins, and the movie ends, with its big philosophical question still unanswered. Specifically, if Farmer is now King, does he have to change his name? That could get confusing. At the very least, he’ll need new business cards.

Psychologists call this a Near Boll Experience…

What a terrible movie. It’s not quite as bad as Eragon, but mostly because it doesn’t have Eragon in it. It’s considerably more boring than that movie, and not surprisingly, was a typical Boll-bomb. Postal looks set to follow suit, and then there’s only Far Cry to go - hopefully. Last I checked, we already had that movie and it was called The Island of Dr. Moreau, but hey, whatever. Like Dungeon Siege, these are pretty much harmless properties. At least a proper director is doing Prince of Persia.