In the little publicity over here at the time of its cinematic release much play was made of Your Highness - and even later in the marketing of the DVD - being a "stoner comedy", with much of the humour seemingly derived from pot-related jokes and situations.
But that is so not the case. Your Highness is a brilliant, well-observed, swords-and-sorcery film that happens to also be hilariously, tears-down-the-cheek, laugh-out-loud funny, obscenely lewd and crude (although with very little actual nudity), quite gross at times with moments of graphic violence and only about two or three scenes involving weed.
James Franco is Fabious, heroic favoured son of King Tallious (Charles Dance) who returns home from his latest quest, having rescued a beautiful maiden - the naïve Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) from the tower of the evil sorcerer Leezar (Justin Theroux).
Unfortunately, on the day of Fabious and Belladonna's wedding, Leezar crashes the festivities and kidnaps the bride-to-be - thus prompting Fabious to embark on another quest.
However, the King insists that Fabious is joined by his foul-mouthed, feckless and irreverent brother Thadeous (Danny McBride) to "make a man of him".
After an unfortunate, early betrayal, the brothers - and Thadeous's page Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker) - team up with lethal, no-nonsense warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman) who saves them from an acid-spitting hydra - and manages to look utterly gorgeous throughout the movie.
The dialogue is a hearty cocktail of cod-dramatic, almost Shakespearean, seriousness and jaunty slang - with the only true anachronism in the story being the appearance of a plate of fishfingers!
The marketing for Your Highness was so intent on pushing the "edgy" drugs angle - which is such a small part of the humour anyway - that it failed to even hint that this was a film with magic and monsters in!
In fact, this is everything I had hoped for from Kröd Mändoon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire (remember that?) and failed to get.
There's a chance this could become the gamer's 21st Century go-to movie for "at table quoting" - alongside earlier classics such as Monty Python And The Holy Grail and Army Of Darkness.
It also made me think: there aren't enough "rescue the princess" scenarios in gaming these days. It's all about finding a special treasure (which Thadeous does) and averting prophecies (which they do), but Your Highness is a great example of how you can blend the classic dungeon-crawl, hack'n'slash mentality with a genuine romantic story as well - and not let the latter get so soppy as to overwhelm the former.
This sort of adventure is heightened by giving the player-characters a personal stake in their quest - which is why it's always good, eventually, to find out a bit about a character's backstory or try to inveigle them into some kind of in-campaign romance or relationship.
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