Zooey Deschanel’s Raunchiest Movie Is An R-Rated, Natalie Portman Fantasy

There are a few strange James Franco movies out there, but this may be the strangest.

By Rick Gonzales
| Published 11 seconds ago

For most of her career, Zooey Deschanel built a brand on quirky, offbeat charm, not anything remotely edgy. That’s exactly why Your Highness stands out. It isn’t a sweet indie or a rom-com detour; it’s a deliberately crude, R-rated stoner fantasy packed with crude jokes, skin, and lowbrow humor. In the middle of all that, Deschanel ends up in what’s easily the most overtly raunchy role of her career, not because the movie is subtle about it, but because it isn’t.

Two Brothers Try To Stop The Birth Of A Dragon

Your Highness follows two royal brothers who couldn’t be more different. Fabious (James Franco) is the classic heroic prince, brave, noble, and next in line for the throne. Thadeous (Danny McBride) is the opposite: lazy, stoned, and completely uninterested in responsibility, content to drift through life with his equally useless companion Courtney.

After defeating the sorcerer Leezar (Justin Theroux), Fabious returns home with Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a rescued maiden he plans to marry. The wedding doesn’t last long. Leezar crashes it, kidnaps her again, and reveals a plan so absurd it fits the movie perfectly: use her to create a dragon that will help him conquer the kingdom.

Forced into action, Thadeous is ordered by his father to join Fabious on a rescue mission or face exile. Along the way, the brothers uncover betrayal within their own ranks, survive a series of increasingly ridiculous threats, and are saved by Isabel (Natalie Portman), a warrior hunting Leezar for revenge.

When Fabious is captured, Thadeous is finally pushed into doing something heroic. The mission turns into a last-ditch assault on Leezar’s stronghold, with the fate of the kingdom resting on the one person least qualified to save it.

Your Highness Failed To Perform On Release

Your Highness was one of the last vestiges of the stoner comedy era, and in a sense, maybe its failure ended it. Released by Universal Pictures in April 2011, the R-rated comedy opened weakly and never recovered, finishing with about $21.6 million domestically and roughly $28 million worldwide against a reported $49 million budget. It was a clear financial miss, with limited audience turnout and poor word of mouth cutting off any chance of a rebound.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago-Sun Times summed up the movie’s problems by saying it’s a “juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs, and four-letter words.”

James Franco, before his cancellation, joked, via Entertainment Weekly, about the movie during the Comedy Central James Franco Roast. “I agreed to do this roast because I wanted to do something I’ve never done before, something that has zero artistic value, something that nobody will remember three months from now, something that’s offensive, homophobic and stars horrifically untalented people and something that’s only a big deal to a handful of teenage stoners on Twitter. You might say, ‘James, didn’t you just describe Your Highness? I wouldn’t know, I didn’t see Your Highness.”