It's recently come to my attention that Uwe Boll directed a sequel to his Dungeon Siege movie, this time starring Dolph Lundgreen. Morbid curiosity compels me to check it out, but it puts me in a dilemma: I don't remember the first thing about the original movie, which I know I've seen. Now, I could forget about it and just watch the damn thing, since I somehow doubt there'll be any clever callbacks or that it will build upon the worldbuilding set out in the first movie. But I'm curious - I do remember quite a few things about Boll's other movies, mostly to do with the fact that I didn't think they were any good. So why have I completely blanked out on Dungeon Siege, a movie based on a series of games I have quite a bit of affection for?
A mystery! So here we go again, into the Uweverse, documented for the first time. Spoiler alert: Turns out it's just a really mediocre, unmemorable movie.
It's been a long, long time since Uwe Boll's last bid for public visibility - So much so that some people might not even be aware of him. So here goes: Boll is a crazy German who built himself a niche making video game adaptations. Pretty fucking bad videogame adaptations: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, even an atrocious FarCry adaptation made before Ubisoft, and the game series, became huge.
He's also famous because he's very outspoken and more than a little toxic - calling people retards, launching a huge publicity stunt calling out his biggest internet detractors to boxing matches, and a bunch more nonsense. If you're to believe internet sleuths, his movies were a front for a The Producers-style German tax evasion scheme - I don't think that was ever proven though.
In a world where there's a whole company devoted to making movies specifically designed to rip off the clueless ("Hey, I heard you liked Atlantic Rim, so I got you a copy!"), I think maybe the hatred for him was a bit outsized; Gaming as a culture is nothing if not petty and vindictive, after all. His stuff is bad, sure, but it's not like it's got any pretensions. You can't really say he ruined FarCry's story, or even Dungeon Siege's (have in mind I like those games!). Postal had some solid jokes, and was respectable in its tastelessness.
So. The obvious main draw for In the Name of the King is the cast, which is stacked with affordable recognizable names. But for me the biggest and best surprise is that the action choreographer is Ching Siu Tung - an actual Hong Kong legend, director of motherfucking Duel to the Death, plus The Swordman-ses and the A Chinese Ghost Story-ses. I hope he got a huge paycheck, because the editing and shooting of the action scenes undoes most of his good work. It still shows through... sometimes. A little.
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| This scene deserves a much better movie around it, dammit. |
You might notice that I've been talking about what's around the movie instead of getting into in as I usually do... and that's because it's just not very interesting. But let's give it a go:
The kingdom of Ehb is being attacked by the Krug, who will henceforth be known as Lumpy Turd Orcs (LTO's), because that's exactly what they look like - Shit-covered orcs, walking around in a sort of silly waddle which I think is a combination of them not being very mobile under the bulky armor and an attempt to make them more animalistic. They end up looking like Power Rangers mooks.
The LTOs are being led by a sexy evil wizard with a New Jersey accent (Ray Liotta) who's seduced the good wizard's daughter (Leelee Sobieski) and is literally mooching the magic off her. Sobieski's performance here is... something else; Let's just say that she gives the role the exact the amount of effort it deserves.
Meanwhile Jason Statham runs a farm, because he's Farmer, you see. He's got an idyllic life with a lovely wife (Claire Forlani) and a son, and is best buds with Ron Perlman. So of course that means the LTOs strike, kill the kid, abduct the wife, and set Farmer off on a collision course with the evil wizard controlling them (incidentally, the effects when he controls them look almost exactly like a low-rent version of when anyone puts on the true ring in the Lord of the Ring movies).
There was an earlier version of the script that had to be scrapped and rewritten (by Doug Taylor) because it was too similar to Lord of the Rings; the final version still extensively... ahem, 'homages' those movies, visually, aurally and plot-wise.
Anyhow. At the same time Farmer goes off on a rampage, the King (Burt Reynolds, who like Sobieski can't be arsed to act), the good wizard (who's all-in because of he is John Rhys-Davies and John Rhys-Davies never half-arses anything) are trying to figure out who's behind the invasion They're passively opposed by the king's nephew, a petulant, perpetually drunk nee'r-do-well played y Mathew Lillard, who at least seems to be having fun trying on an English accent. He's in cahoots with the evil wizard, of course.
There's quite a few fights, with some interesting twists. The action is quite a bit more martial artsy than other fantasy movies, owing to the pedigree behind it. Statham actually does all right by it, with a lot of kicks and tumbling about, though the shooting style lets it down by featuring a lot of cuts and constant camera movement. I've seen some behind-the-scenes style shots of some of these scenes and they actually look much better than the end product; In them you can see the actual film camera whizzing by, on rails.
There's some silly stuff as well which seems like it would be right at home in a Chinese movie, so I do wonder how much influence Ching Siu Tung had on them. There's honest-to-god ninjas that join a general melee at one point, that's fun (I think they're meant to be elves). There's a surprising amount of heightened tree climbing and brachiation, including Kristanna Locken in a leather push-up bra and friends swinging down from the treetops in magical vines. Also, the LTOs build a giant slingshot to launch themselves into battle. The final fight against sexy evil wizard Liotta has some cool moves and poses, possibly the place where you can most see the action coordinator's influence.
The effects are mostly poor, the designs tend to ape Lord of the Rings... poorly, and the dialog is terrible - so many scenes consist of people talking nonsense at each other, stuff that sounds vaguely ominous or cool-sounding but doesn't actually mean anything. And the music, when it's not trying to mimic Howard Shore, often poorly fits the scenes it's scoring. This is especially galling as the games had some truly excellent, very memorable music; I wonder if they needed to pay extra to get it?
Stay through the credits for not one but two Blind Guardian songs, plus one by Hammerfall. None of them written for the movie, and neither of the Guardian songs are as good as the one they wrote for an actual videogame.
It completely fails as a fantasy movie mostly because despite an abundance of pretty nice-looking locales and sets, there's next to no sense of it being a coherent world, just a jumble of elements and places, many of them pretty derivative. Few of the actors even try to put on an accent, any accent, and I seriously doubt anyone thought about trying to coordinate them in any way.
As a game adaptation... meh. It does follow the events of the first Dungeon Siege game, somewhat: the LTO attacks, a broken bridge, the evil and good wizards, etc. I'm not even going to pretend to care that they did the story wrong or whatever, since the first two games were extremely poorly written, all po-faced fantasy filler. I mean, the kingdom is called Ehb! That's how much effort the original game writers put into it. The third Dungeon Siege game was handed out to another company and actually had an excellent story, but that came out years after the movie got made.
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| Dude, where's your armor? |
The main crime it commits against the games (and common sense) is kind of hilarious, conceptually: The protagonist keeps his farmer's simple shirt and breeches for the whole movie, even when he goes to war. Because he's Farmer, dontcha know, a simple guy, guv.
The Dungeon Siege games are an offshoot of Diablo, and all about collecting and equipping incrementally better loot; So if the adaptation was serious about doing the game justice, it'd have Statham wearing incrementally more elaborate costumes, until by the end he'd have spikes all over, a dozen-meter-long cloak and police lights on his shoulders.
It's also pretty funny (and so, so stupid) that the guy doesn't get out of the same peasant's outfit throughout the whole movie, even when he finds out that he's the crown prince (spoiler!). Success don't change him none. It's thematic!
To be honest, I wouldn't say this is a trainwreck or anything; If I had to compare it to something, I'd say it's most similar to shitty TV fantasy shows like that horrible Earthsea adaptation the Sci Fi channel did back in the oughts - and this is easily better than that. It's just kind of bad, and mostly boring. Weirdly inert and so, so bloated - asking us to give two shits about side characters that we couldn't even muster a half-hearted fart for. Though that's probably my fault for getting the 30-minutes-longer director's cut.
Maybe I'll get around to the sequel someday, which at least is only ninety minutes... but this has kind of killed my enthusiasm for it.
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