Cynical Cinema

First came House of the Dead.  Then Alone in the Dark.  Then Bloodrayne.  And now comes Uwe Boll’s absolute best film!  On the heels of several of the most putrid, stinky directorial efforts in the history of cinema, Boll has managed to create a film that is merely putrid and smelly.  I recognized just about every actor in this movie, which stuns me.  How is this guy, the most villified director working today, able to convince people to appear in his films?  Well, it provides a pretty decent barometer for actors.  Which ones actually care about their craft, and which ones are in it only for the money.  In The Name of the King features the following actors who are in it only for the money:  Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Lelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Kristanna Loken, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard and John Rhys-Davies.

 Why do you need a name actor (albeit not BIG-name actors) in every major role in a film?  When you have an inexplicable budget of 80 million dollars and no idea how to spend it.  What costs a lot of money?  Name actors.  Perfect.  So…we still have money left?  Good.  Let’s spend it on swooshy foggy special effects.  We can use that like forty times in the movie before it irritates people!  And since we have more than two hours to tell our story, but only six minutes of actual story, let’s have super-long battle scenes.  Each thirty-minute battle scene ought to have at least four thousand jump cuts, since it has been proven that movie audiences are unable to focus on a given image for more than one tenth of a second.  And they HATE knowing what’s happening in a battle.

Given the fact that one and a half hours of this two hour plus movie is taken up with sword fighting and battleaxes and creepy evil creatures killing innocent villagers and children, giving it a PG rating is bonkers.  By the standards of the MPAA, this movie does in fact fit into the PG area.  There is no real blood, and what blood there is is some kind of black smokey stuff.  Boll seems so intent on getting that rating, however, that the fighting is boring and sanitized and very confusing.  Which means three quarters of the movie is boring and sanitized and confusing.  Getting name actors at the very least means that you are getting fairly decent actors.  Which also means that when you cram them into this pile of garbage, it’s even more painful watching them struggle to make something interesting out of the horrible dialogue and idiotic set-pieces.  They literally have nothing to do, and no opportunity is given to them to make this any better.

The non-name actors, however, seem to think they are in a Shakespeare play.  They deliver their lines with stage-actor pomp and pretension, projecting their lines at some non-existent audience.  And at the beginning, the movie is written as though someone thought he was Shakespeare.  “Respect doth need be earned by the mass of men.  Mine be my birthright!”  What?  Mercifully, this ends fairly quickly and the movie forgets about it’s pretensions to the Bard by Minute Twenty-one.  Then the movie gets into painful, through-the-eyeball-into-the smoky-swirly shots, and slow-motion camera work that follows every object around as it is carried from  place to place. 

The movie is more than two hours long, and yet, plot points pop up incredibly abruptly.  You are the son of the king!  Wait…what?  Couldn’t there have been some kind of buildup there?  This leads to the film having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever.  Burt Reynolds seems to be channeling his lackluster performance from Striptease, there are multiple bizarre shots straight out of Tremors, there are ninjas.  Ninjas that do everything in a synchronized fashion, as though they are competing in the new Olympic demonstration event, synchronized ninja-ing.  The soundtrack music is awful and intrusive, there is a scene where Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds hold hands - in slow-motion!  Hundreds of “why did that guy do that”, or “what happened to that guy”, or “how did that guy get there” moments, and the grand finale involves a swordfight where the swords are controlled by the minds of magicians and - fight themselves!  There is nothing in this movie worth watching, nothing worth mentioning, and nothing that didn’t make me angry.  But it IS the best one Uwe Boll has ever done.  And it’s on Blu-Ray today.  Because any movie is Blu-Ray worthy.

First came House of the Dead.  Then Alone in the Dark.  Then Bloodrayne.  And now comes Uwe Boll’s absolute best film!  On the heels of several of the most putrid, stinky directorial efforts in the history of cinema, Boll has managed to create a film that is merely putrid and smelly.  I recognized just about every actor in this movie, which stuns me.  How is this guy, the most villified director working today, able to convince people to appear in his films?  Well, it provides a pretty decent barometer for actors.  Which ones actually care about their craft, and which ones are in it only for the money.  In The Name of the King features the following actors who are in it only for the money:  Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Lelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Kristanna Loken, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard and John Rhys-Davies.

 Why do you need a name actor (albeit not BIG-name actors) in every major role in a film?  When you have an inexplicable budget of 80 million dollars and no idea how to spend it.  What costs a lot of money?  Name actors.  Perfect.  So…we still have money left?  Good.  Let’s spend it on swooshy foggy special effects.  We can use that like forty times in the movie before it irritates people!  And since we have more than two hours to tell our story, but only six minutes of actual story, let’s have super-long battle scenes.  Each thirty-minute battle scene ought to have at least four thousand jump cuts, since it has been proven that movie audiences are unable to focus on a given image for more than one tenth of a second.  And they HATE knowing what’s happening in a battle.

Given the fact that one and a half hours of this two hour plus movie is taken up with sword fighting and battleaxes and creepy evil creatures killing innocent villagers and children, giving it a PG rating is bonkers.  By the standards of the MPAA, this movie does in fact fit into the PG area.  There is no real blood, and what blood there is is some kind of black smokey stuff.  Boll seems so intent on getting that rating, however, that the fighting is boring and sanitized and very confusing.  Which means three quarters of the movie is boring and sanitized and confusing.  Getting name actors at the very least means that you are getting fairly decent actors.  Which also means that when you cram them into this pile of garbage, it’s even more painful watching them struggle to make something interesting out of the horrible dialogue and idiotic set-pieces.  They literally have nothing to do, and no opportunity is given to them to make this any better.

The non-name actors, however, seem to think they are in a Shakespeare play.  They deliver their lines with stage-actor pomp and pretension, projecting their lines at some non-existent audience.  And at the beginning, the movie is written as though someone thought he was Shakespeare.  “Respect doth need be earned by the mass of men.  Mine be my birthright!”  What?  Mercifully, this ends fairly quickly and the movie forgets about it’s pretensions to the Bard by Minute Twenty-one.  Then the movie gets into painful, through-the-eyeball-into-the smoky-swirly shots, and slow-motion camera work that follows every object around as it is carried from  place to place. 

The movie is more than two hours long, and yet, plot points pop up incredibly abruptly.  You are the son of the king!  Wait…what?  Couldn’t there have been some kind of buildup there?  This leads to the film having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever.  Burt Reynolds seems to be channeling his lackluster performance from Striptease, there are multiple bizarre shots straight out of Tremors, there are ninjas.  Ninjas that do everything in a synchronized fashion, as though they are competing in the new Olympic demonstration event, synchronized ninja-ing.  The soundtrack music is awful and intrusive, there is a scene where Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds hold hands - in slow-motion!  Hundreds of “why did that guy do that”, or “what happened to that guy”, or “how did that guy get there” moments, and the grand finale involves a swordfight where the swords are controlled by the minds of magicians and - fight themselves!  There is nothing in this movie worth watching, nothing worth mentioning, and nothing that didn’t make me angry.  But it IS the best one Uwe Boll has ever done.