In The Name Of The King!

A line never heard in the span of the entire movie.

The only reason we heard about this movie was because we saw the trailer once. We think when we were watching Rendition. It looked to have everything a classic fantasy should have (judging from a trailer, mind), good guys vs bad guys who look like orcs, tree-huggers swinging from vines who could be elves, lush unspoilt landscapes of grasslands, forests and mountains...ok, we were really thinking of some Peter Jackson LOTR wannabe but hey, it looked promising. And it's based on the game Dungeon Siege.

Trailers always do, don't they?

Then we found out that Uwe Boll was director, and we cringed. Well most of what we ever heard about him was from other people bashing his ability to screw up movies based on video games or the likes. Well, video game movies never really could live up to expectations, and we've seen a fair share of our favourite games crumble box-office-wise since we were young: Super Mario Bros ("It's a Bob-omb!!!"), Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat (don't talk to us about Mortal Kombat: Annihilation...our poor Mileena), Alone In The Dark.

Among the abovementioned, Uwe Boll only directed and produced Alone In The Dark, but even then we were sorely disappointed. Fell asleep watching the show halfway and never was interested enough to finish watching it too. It was Alone In The Dark! It's supposed to be a horror/thriller! Nevermind. On with the show.

Well, maybe like how Tough Teacher puts it, because our expectations dropped so low, the show didn't turn out as bad as we thought it would. Also maybe since we have no idea how the game goes there really was no set level of expectation. The storyline's pretty much straightforward, a farmer named Farmer goes on to great adventures and triumphs over evil in the end. The storyline could have been made richer if the show was stretched out more, but at slightly over 2 hours, it was ok lah.

OK the post got so bloody long we decided to just cut the following rants to just quick lines.

We've never watched Jason Statham act before so we're wondering if his acting here is the same as in Transporter? John Rhys-Davies reminds us a bit of his role as the Atreides mentat...and now we miss Gimli. Matthew Lillard (whom we only remember as Shaggy in Scooby-Doo) must have really enjoyed his role. No stand out performance really.

While the show is so-so, we wondered why the colours were...what's that word? Desaturated? It had that dull, slightly-brown feel to it that reminded us a lot of when we used to watch movies on RTM2 on Thursdays or Fridays during their Dunhill Double features. Was it on purpose to make the film look old? What's wrong with sharp and clear colours? Will it make the krugs look fake? Oh oh oh if the desaturated colours didn't make the show look old, adding Burt Reynolds in certainly did! We always think of Win, Lose or Draw when it comes to Burt Reynolds.

All in all, this show is best viewed on cheap Wednesday movies or for DVD Night with Domino's Pizza. There's plenty of eyecandy to go around. And we think it'll be better than Dragon Wars, to give an example. :P