Review: IN THE NAME OF THE KING: A DUNGEON SIEGE TALE

That movie, I could admire, because it was clearly made by people who demonstrated the courage of their convictions. But In the Name of the King, with the incredibly optimistic “A Dungeon Siege Tale” tacked onto the end (as if to leave room for sequels), looks like it was made by a mad man with an insane desire to make a cheap hunk of cheese look like it belongs on an expensive plate of fine bone china. He’d do better to simply stick it between two crackers and bite down hard.

The movie starts off just fine with brief scenes of the leading players in their respective scenarios: Liotta romancing Leelee with some sort of magical special effects going on; John Rhys-Davies (as a Magi and advisor to the King) sagely crying out “No!” as if it meant something; Statham, as a character known as “Farmer,” er, farming a field with his son when Perlman shows up as a friendly neighbor; Reynolds as the King and Matthew Lillard (doing his best to bring the 20th Century to the “middle ages time out of place” that is the setting for the film) as his cowardly Nephew. The opening sequences reminded me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas. You half expect someone to say: “And here’s the Villain, and this here’s the Beautiful Woman, and here’s the Wise Friend, and here’s the Hero and His Wife and Son, and this here is the Doomed Friendly Neighbor, and don’t forget the Wise and Kind King Who Will Die Before His Time and the Nephew Who Will Betray Him.”

It’s all laid out for us in the first few minutes; unfortunately, the film itself takes 120 minutes to tell its all too predictable story.

But we don’t come to an Uwe Boll film for the story, we come for the bad action and the bad dialogue and the bad acting, and maybe some naked women and blood, plenty of blood.

Bad action is delivered in spades. Halfway through, we get a pretty decent battle sequence (with the aforementioned Ugly Krugs and fiery catapaults, plus the Tony Jaa rip-off, plus a big horse rearing up) and later we get two more decent action sequences (one with gliding magical forest women riding vines like Viking versions of Tarzan, only more covered up, and also the final duel between Statham and Liotta). To get to that minimal amount of enjoyment, there’s a lot of sitting around and doing nothing.

To illustrate: I thought the film print was messed up, because I kept hearing a loud irregular sound, sorta like white noise in the background. Very annoying. So I got up to find someone to tell, walked halfway through the multiplex, found someone, explained it to her, stood at the side of the auditorium, couldn’t hear it again, listened some more, thanked her, and sat down again. (Later she told me it was the ventilation system.)

I was disappointed I had only missed about five minutes of the movie. I confess that I allowed my boredom to keep me from keeping proper track of the plot and all the characters, but, honest, it really gets bogged down for long stretches in which nothing happens. I think it will be much more tolerable when it comes out on DVD and you can simply fast forward to the good parts.

Oh, I have to tell you about Ray Liotta’s set-up. Like I said, he’s playing some kind of wizard or Magi or something like that. I don’t know where his power comes from, but he stands in the middle of a room in an old castle and can control all the Krug (a race of people who all look like troglodytes), and the weather too. Statham manages to defeat him at one point, and Liotta, glowering, bellows: “All you’ve saved is time!” Ouch—that must have hurt.

And just to let you know that I do care—some of the actors were good, it’s just that the performance style and dialogue were wildly inconsistent. To wit, my beloved Leelee acted like she was in a classic drama, Statham was his usual gruff action hero, Perlman was a silly yet brave sidekick, Lillard wildly overacted. Nothing meshed; it was as though Uwe just told them to “act natural.”

Please, Dr. Boll, please: make us another entertaining movie. It doesn’t have to be good in the eyes of the critics in general, but it can never again be this boring.