I hate interactive marketing. If you’re going to feed me commercials on TV, fine. If you’re going to force me to watch them at the theater as well, fuck it. I can ignore them and talk to whoever I’m at the movie with. But if you seriously expect me to log onto the internet when I get home, just so I can FINISH WATCHING THE COMMERCIAL YOU MADE ME SIT THROUGH THE FIRST HALF OF IN THE THEATER, then you can fuck right off. Stupid Coke. I like Coke. Coke, don’t make me fucking hate you.
An even more appropriate title for this movie would have been, In the Name of the King: The Brownest Story Ever Told. I don’t think there was a single frame of this thing that wasn’t shot in sepia tone. Seriously, the movie is so goddamn brown, that the super-brown Orc-wannabe Krugs are nearly indistinguishable against the equally brown forest they spend most of the movie running around in. If Uwe Boll is a master of anything, it’s making an extremely well-lit and decently framed shot as indecipherable as two black panthers fucking in a cloud of tire smoke on a moonless night at the bottom of a well.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I suppose we’ll start with a bit of story. This movie is based on a video game that no one remembers. The storyline in the movie is a very basic breakdown of that in the game. The game has more monsters, and many different kingdoms instead of just one. In the movie, the kingdom of Middle Ear…uh…I mean, Ehb is in danger of being overthrown by an evil sorcerer named Saruman. I mean, Gallian. He wants to overthrow King Konreid and take over the land using his army of trained Uruk…er…Krugs. Standing in his way is a farmer, cleverly named Farmer, whose son is killed by the Krugs in the first raid. His wife is taken prisoner, and he vows to rescue her and gain his vengeance. He also takes his buddies Norick and Bastjan. King Konreid is aided by his magus Merick, and his daughter, Muriella, who is under Gallian’s spell for a while, but comes to her senses and helps defeat him in the end. And it’s even more convoluted than that. And it’s two goddamn hours long.
So we’ll start with the good. Boll is getting better at defrauding the German tax system to the point where he can actually get a budget to make his movies now. He is also becoming a better filmmaker, in the purely technical aspects of making a movie. His flicks now look like real movies, not home videos shot by a kid. The effects are decent, and he can afford to embarrass more real actors now than ever before.
We’ll sidetrack here to take a moment to talk about embarrassed actors. Burt Reynolds, who has basically become an intentional self-parody, is pretty hard to embarrass these days. He’s pretty goddamn cool (in reality, not in this movie), and he doesn’t really ham it up here, which is disappointing. If ever there was a chance to flex your Shatner muscle and just devour every bit of scenery the set dressers can come up with, it’s working on a Boll flick. Same for Statham, Ron Perlman (who admitted to taking this movie because his wife wanted to buy more shoes, and he clearly doesn’t give a shit about a single line he says), John Rhys-Davies (who is not a shy one when it comes to hammy acting), Leelee Sobieski, Claire Forlani, and the rest of the cast, with two awesome exceptions. Matthew Lillard, as Konreid’s scheming nephew Duke Fallow, was either drunk out of his skull the entire shoot, or just went for the jugular every time he was in front of the camera.
And then we have Ray Liotta. Now, this movie can’t really hurt a film career that was begun by raping Pia Zadora with a garden hose. Liotta is pretty much our generation’s Michael Pataki – destined to be nothing but a skuzzy, greasy creep his entire career. Plus, I’m pretty sure the only reason he signed on for this flick was that he gets to spend the first half of it rubbing his oily mug all over Leelee Sobieski. But anyway, holy shit. I really wish he would have had more screen time, because he is easily the most entertaining thing about the whole movie. Not only is he oily here, he is also extremely puffy-looking, like every time he went to shoot a scene, he’d just got up from a nap or something. It doesn’t help that he only has two facial expressions in this movie; he’s either bugging his eyes out and pulling his fleshless lips over his teeth, or he’s blowing his cheeks out and straining ‘til he’s red in the face, like he’s trying to crap his pants and make his eyes pop out at the same time.
Back to what I was saying before, about Boll getting more technically proficient at his craft. This is destined to be his downfall. Back in the good ol’ House of the Dead days, when everything was super-cheap and rushed and you could see the pneumatic launchers that fired the flying zombies into the air, the man was a legend. Hailed as a hack of Ed Wood-ian proportions. People still definitely talk about him in such a fashion, but I think these days it’s more wishful thinking with a smelly little dash of denial. Our b-movie hero is losing his touch. Or rather, he’s gaining his touch. Let’s look at his last few movies. I actually liked Bloodrayne. Its sequel was boring as fuck, but there was absolutely nothing funny about it.
And now we have ItNotK, which is easily his best-looking movie to date, and it has a few of those retarded Boll touches we’ve come to know and love, like a Krug jumping into a catapult, kicking his legs as if to say, “Me wanna ride!”, and his comrades light him on fire and shoot him at the enemy. This is absolutely hilarious the first time, but it happens about a hundred more times in the final battle, without the benefit of fire, and immediately wears out its welcome. Later, Gillian faces down a vengeful Farmer in the final duel and uses his super-badass-wicked magical powers to…trap Farmer in a tornado of books? What the fuck? He threw magically created swords at Merick! Books!?
However, if you set aside those few little moments of Boll gold, we have a movie with a full two-hour run time that is pretty entertaining in the first 45 minutes or so. For the entire second act, I had to exert a conscious effort to keep my eyes open, and even then my chin hit my chest a couple of times. It picks up in the last fifteen minutes or so, and then there’s some sweet power metal (Blind Guardian and Hammerfall for those keeping count, another Nuclear Blast soundtrack) over the end credits. But seriously, we go to Boll movies to be bowled (Bolled, get it!?) over by silliness and retardedly inept filmmaking. If Boll starts making technically passable but boring and generic crap, his legacy will quickly be forgotten. And fuck, his next movie, Postal, looks like it might actually even be kinda good! Two good movies from Uwe Boll? What is the world coming to? Seriously, Boll, quit letting us down. You are never going to be good. You are never going to be mentioned in the same breath as Romero, Carpenter, Fulci, and the other great directors; no matter how badly your delusional little German mind wants it. Your only hope to have your name immortalized in our beloved genre is for you to SUCK. And I mean FUCKING SUCK. HARD. Go back and watch House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, get in the headspace you were in making those two movies, and follow that formula. Otherwise, your movies will be earning zero box office for all the wrong reasons. And we’d hate for you to give up your artistic integrity and continue to be a massive failure because you just aren’t entertaining anymore.
The Moral of the Story: Oh my god! I can’t see anymore! Everything is just brown! The fucking movie blinded me and now all I can see is the color brown! Hello? Is anyone there? I can’t tell, because all I can HEAR is brown now, too! OH GOD! THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE IS BROWN, AND IT’S HERE! BOLL FINALLY DID IT! HE UNLEASHED A LOVECRAFTIAN GOD WITH HIS SHITTY FILMMAKING! BROOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWNNNNNNNNNNNNNN! BOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!
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