In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale Film Review
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale ⭐️⭐️.
I’ve been doing this a film a day challenge for over a month now, and it’s films like this that have made me enjoy it so much. I’ve realised films don’t have to be great, or even good, for me to absolutely love them. In The Name of The King, is a truly awful film, but I loved every single second of it.
Everything I love, and there is to love about bargain-bin fantasy epics is comprised together in this picture. Now that’s not necessarily a good thing, and this film is a perfect example of why it’s not, but it was still enjoyable. Look, In The Name of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (that doesn’t half roll off the tongue, does it) really isn’t anything more than a BTEC version of LOTR made with a tenth of the budget, and regrettably hardly any actual “Dungeon Siege-ing” actually occurs. It even stars the one and only Gimli, but a regular height magical Gimli. The only positive point for this film apposed to LORT I can find, is the highly inventive way of the Krugs catapulting one of their own “men” set aflame. That’s something they should’ve definitely had in the Lord of the Rings
But, and take this how you will, it does have a rubber suited monster army, wire-fu fighting, several established actors of ranging ability with varied accents. And to top it off, an elaborate ending fight between Jason Statham, and Ray Liotta, an evil magician and a farmer of royal blood. It’s basically Stardust without a Take That melody, less pirates, and arguably just as much romance.
Yet another one of Uwe Boll’s quick video game adaptations, In The Name of The King tells the tale of Farmer, a simple farmer (believe it or not) living a quiet life with his family and turnips. Farmer’s life gets unrooted and flipped on its side when a monster army called Krugs invade his village, killing his son and kidnapping his wife. Farmer, portrayed by Jason Statham, must embark on a quest of revenge and redemption across a broken land ravaged by dark magic, and poor production values.
As much as I enjoyed this picture, it was riddled with things I truly didn’t understand. For instance: The fact that a studio gave Boll $60m to make this; It’s literally packed with a cast list of actual known actors, yet no good acting; The fact it clearly was edited by a bored, distracted youth doing it for their A Level coursework, whom they also probably employed to choreograph the fight scenes and construct the Krug prosthetics.
For anyone, and I mean anyone, who thinks they’ve seen an enjoyably bad, high budget movie really hasn’t until they’ve endured this, this is the new benchmark from which I’ll rate this certain criteria from in the future. It was a work of art, but realistically not all art is beautiful.
The same two issues that plague every Uwe Boll film are massively evident here as well. The story is far too complicated for something so poorly written, covering Farmer and his quest for revenge, the struggle between two wizards, or Magi, the rocky relationship one Magi has with his daughter who is learning to use magic and in love with the evil Magi, a growing schism between the king and his rebellious nephew, the conflict between said nephew and the king’s top general and a few smaller, even more pointless, plots. To accomplish telling this many stories in a short time, Boll fills the film with loads of short, often contextless and extremely abrupt cuts and scene changes and often leaves plot threads dangling for big chucks of the movie until they are needed again.
The other big problem is, of course, the dialogue, which continues in Boll’s tradition of awfulness, and tends to lead more to unintentional laughs than dramatic effect. This was a constant recurring theme, honestly this film made me laugh so much more than I ever predicted I would before hand, something I can’t imagine was the plan of Boll.
Overall, this is a really really bad film, but my god I enjoyed watching it so much and will probably watch it again in the future.
