Ok where do I begin to describe this movie called In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale…
Well I decided that I wanted to see this movie because it has Jason Statham who is a complete bad ass and I have yet to see a movie he was in that wasn’t great, well until now. In the Name of the King seemed to have the budget and special effects from the Hercules TV show with Kevin Sorbo (the acting was almost as bad as well). But what do you expect when you cast people like Burt Reynolds as a heroic king and Matthew Lillard as the Duke Fallow (whenever I see this guy I can only think of Brock Hudson from another great movie She's All That.
Oh I forgot, the movie starts out the same as the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (well similar), the Farmer’s (Jason Statham’s) family is killed by these beasts called Crug. The Crug are basically a rip off of the Orcs from Lord of the Rings, and are created by the Maji (Wizard) Gallian. Anyways the farmer whose name is Farmer (lol) lived peacefully as a farmer (who would have thought) until his son was killed and his wife was captured (so technically his whole family wasn’t killed). Anyways he goes to save his wife and that’s the plot, kind of.
I want to talk a little bit about the great special effects in this movie for a second. The graphics are fantastic especially the way they pulled off this amazing zip line feat across a deep canyon (two people fell probably like 100 feet into a shallow river and were perfectly fine). The amazing graphics can be seen again with the Elve like people and their ability to wield vine snake creatures to grab people, then swing on the vines to get around the forest.
Now this movie would not be complete without some ridiculous action and weapons. Farmer wields a boomerang which I am pretty sure he mastered the technique when he was in Australia hunting dingoes. This magical boomerang has the ability to take out Crug with a single hit and always comes back, which could only remind me of one of my favorite shows of all time, Xena Warrior Princess and here circle thing that she threw at people.
The battle scenes in this movie were also epic, especially when the Crug started lighting themselves on fire and shooting themselves into trees (lmao I wish I was kidding). Now to make another Xena reference the elves in this movie were all hot women who never leave the forest, which reminded me a lot of the Amazon women from Xena.
The story continues as everyone tries to kill galleon which essentially is a combo of king Saromon and the ring itself (if you kill him all the orc, I mean crug die and everyone lives happily ever after). I can continue to make Lord of the Rings references because this movie is basically a lower budge film of the same stuff (they even had a wizard fight which was like Gandalf v. Saruman round two).
So in conclusion there were a lot of really unrealistic scenes, bad special effects, cheesy dialog, a predictable ending, generic bad buys, and bad acting. When Farmer realized his father was the king, is probable my favorite scene of the movie because it reminded me of when Zorro (in the Mask of Zorro) was he was reunited with his daughter who remembered the smell of the flowers by her crib, it had that kind of silliness to it only they were reciting a saying). My final problem with the movie was the fact that it was over 2 hours, I mean honestly why prolong the this crap you already stole the peoples money why take two hours of there life?