In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Movie DVD Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 04.18.2008

Proof positive that Uwe Boll should stick to "laughably bad"

Directed by: Uwe Boll

Starring:
Ray Liotta - Gallian
Jason Statham - Farmer Daimon
Leelee Sobieski - Muriella
Brian J. White - Commander Tarish
Will Sanderson - Bastian
Ron Perlman - Norrick
Matthew Lillard - Duke Fallow
Burt Reynolds - King Konreid
Kristanna Loken - Elora
Claire Forlani - Solana
John Rhys Davies - Merick

Domestic Gross: $4,775,656
Worldwide Gross: $11,568,722

DVD Release Date: 4/1/2008
Running Time: 127 minutes



Rated PG-13 for intense battle sequences.

There are two predominant schools of thought when critics take to reviewing an Uwe Boll film. The German director, the man behind such horrendous films as House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne, is one of the most reviled directors in Hollywood. It’s for very good reason; Boll’s habit of buying the rights to video game adaptations through his production company has resulted in some of the worst movies of the twenty-first century. So the habit of critics is to either attempt to review the film with the same standards as any other movie—an exercise in futility if searching for a positive review—or try and apply “the Boll standard” to it, and attempt to view the film in a ‘so bad it’s good’ mindset. At least, some of the time, Boll’s films can be viewed much like the movies of the infamous Ed Wood, to where one can find some enjoyment in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 way. It’s therefore disappointing to say that Boll’s latest “epic” film, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Movie, fails when either standard is applied. The sword-and-sorcery fantasy, based off the Dungeon Siege video games, manages neither to be remotely good by normal standards, or quite over-the-top enough to provoke inadvertent laughs. It’s simply bad in every definition of the word.

The Movie

The movie, set in the land of Ehb, tells the story of Farmer (Statham), a man who was discovered by his village as a young boy. Having been named after what he learned to do—sadly, this is one of the many silly aspects that has the best explanation to it—he’s grown to become an excellent farmer, as well as a husband to his wife Solana (Forlani) and father to his son Zeph. Farmer is content to live a peaceful life with his family, but unfortunately it isn’t to be. An army of Krugs, orc-like beasts commanded by the evil magus Gallian (Liotta) have invaded as part of a plot to replace the king (Reynolds). Farmer’s son is killed and his wife taken captive, and he sets out with his best friend Norrick (Perlman) and his brother-in-law Bastian (Sanderson) in order to regain his wife and get his vengeance.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s truly difficult to know where to begin. At a sprawling length of over two hours, the film still seems incomplete. Watching the movie, it’s blatantly obvious that large swaths of the plot were cut to get the running time down. The scenes that remain, as stitched together by Boll and screenwriter Doug Taylor, often times seem like a collection of random scenes, and entire subplots are poorly explained or forgotten completely. Of course, this could well be a good thing, because what’s there isn’t good at all. The script is a typically dumb example of Boll's films; however, Taylor seems to have actually tried to elevate it above the usual laughable dialogue shown in BloodRayne and the like. Unfortunately, this lifts it just above “so bad it’s good” and into a level of mediocrity that makes it even less enjoyable of a viewing experience than it otherwise would have been. The only times you get to see elements of the classic Boll “brilliance” is in brief flashes, like the battle sequences where the heroic defenders let their ninjas loose. Yes, ninjas in a medieval fantasy. One can almost hear Boll when he was plotting it out—“Hey, everyone loves ninjas. This’ll get me an Oscar for sure!” I suppose we're lucky there were no pirates.

The acting is simply something that cannot be adequately described, though I’ll attempt it. Jason Statham plays the role as if he doesn’t realize he’s in a fantasy film and not another Transporter. Mr. Statham, for this role, you were not Chev Chalios, and this was not the day that you die. Leelee Sobieski, Claire Forlani, and Kristanna Loken, the token females of the movie, are put in ridiculous outfits and largely given nothing to do but spout off horrible dialogue and, in the case of Forlani and Sobieski, pine for completely unlovable characters. John Rhys-Davies and Ron Perlman are the only two who try to bring anything of value to their roles, but they’ve have both been better off hamming it up, because the material is not worth their effort. Burt Reynolds goes down as one of the most miscast roles of the decade, and throws absolutely no life into the role of King Konreid. Ray Liotta is so scathingly bad, it makes one forget that this was the same man who lit up the screen as Henry Hill in GoodFellas. And the less that can be said of Mathew Lillard’s jaw-droppingly bad, over-the-top performance as Duke Fallow, the better. Lillard’s never been one for playing a role straight, but this one takes the cake. The true question to me is how Boll manages to get high-profile actors for these films. The paycheck can’t be THAT important when considering the damage to their professional reputation.

The fight scenes are atrociously bad and chaotic, often poorly-lit. Characters are put in positions of importance, such as Loken’s forest queen Elora, and then do absolutely nothing. There is a plot twist that can be seen a mile away. The one positive is the moderately good special effects, even if they’re used to do ridiculous things like create a whirlwind of books that don’t even do any real damage to their target. There’s simply nothing good or of value here, and very little that can even be laughed at. As a result, we’re left with an achingly sub-par effort that, while it’s not Boll’s worst effort to be captured on celluloid, is definitely his least enjoyable…a film that makes the infamously bad Dungeons and Dragons look like The Lord of the Rings.

Film Rating: 2.0

Technical Aspects

The film is presented in 2:35 to 1 widescreen, and the transfer is about as good as it could be. Of course, this doesn’t help any when the night scenes were poorly lit in the first place, but it does bring out the special effects moderately well. The only audio option is Dolby 5.1 Surround in English, and captions for English and Spanish. Again, this is fine, though there’s not much use for it, as the sound is poorly done in the film and the score weak and hackneyed.

Technical Rating: 5.5

Special Features

Behind the Scenes Featurette (10:21): If you think the film is lazy, you won’t be surprised by the similar nature of the special features. To start with, we have this featurette, which is merely ten and a half minutes of what another camera captured while the film was being made. There’s no narration, no interviews with the cast, and a score as equally generic as the film’s. I for one would have liked to see Statham, Liotta, and Reynolds try to keep a straight face as they talked about the film, but alas.

Deleted and Extended Scenes (9:33): There’s three scenes of additional footage, two of which are completely superfluous. The first, at least, offers us a scene that reveals the fate of one character that was left ambiguous in the movie. Frankly, it should have been kept in.

Theatrical Trailer (1:34): Should I mention that this, while the best of the trailers that were put out (the rest looked like the kind of bad fan-made videos you see on YouTube), it’s still horrendous? Yeah, I figured that was self-explanatory.

Other Trailers: We get trailers for Jumper, Resurrecting the Champ, and Possession. The irony is that Boll recently trashed Jumper during an interview on G4’s “Attack of the Show,” which I’m sure 20th Century Fox, the distributer of the DVD, just loved.

Special Features: 4.0

The 411: The question has often been asked, "What would happen if Uwe Boll made a film that wasn't laughably bad?" Well, we've discovered the answer, and unfortunately, the answer is that it would be even less enjoyable then his other efforts. With bad writing, bad-to-horrific acting, horrible fight scenes, and non-sensical elements out of nowhere (Ninjas!), In the Name of the King is perhaps Boll's best film, and at the same time his least-watchable. A lazy set of special features makes this a thoroughly avoidable DVD.

Final Score:  2.5   [ Very Bad ]