Robert Zemeckis is not committed to direct the film, which is being developed as an R-rated live-action/CG-hybrid budgeted in the $20 million-$30 million range. No screenwriter is attached.
Written by Chuck Sambuchino, "How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack: Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (and They Will)," is a tongue-in-cheek survival guide to help garden gnome-owners prepare for and ward off an imminent invasion from the menacing lawn statues.
In the trailers Your Highness looked great. After all, it’s usually fun, and maybe even a tiny bit flattering to us, when Americans decide they want to spoof English movies. It’s especially happy-making to see Americans take such delight in adopting hoity-toity English accents as they hoof around pseudo-medieval forests cack-handedly trying to wield their mighty swords.
There’s an intriguing cast – Pineapple Express co-stars James Franco and Danny McBride: the former so cute, the latter so cutting; plus Natalie Portman, hot on the heels of Black Swan, in a larkier, less anguished role than she usually plays. There are enough rude jokes and stoner gags to satisfy the inner Seth Rogen in all of us.
And looking after the whole gleefully tawdry shebang is David Gordon Green, whose early films George Washington and All the Real Girls made him the poster-boy of neo-poetic realism, but whose strange, zig-zagging career ended up with him helming the wildly silly, stupidly funny Pineapple Express. Really, there was no way Your Highness could disappoint.
Wrong! It’s bad. It makes Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights look like a masterpiece. Plodding where it should gallop, crude more than lewd, provoking shrugs rather than thigh-slaps, it should be called Your Lowness.
The plot? Oh, OK then. So there’s this big, leering chump of a prince called Thadeous (McBride) who likes making out with dwarves’ wives and has never performed an act of gallantry in his life. His handsome and obviously homosexual brother Prince Fabious (Franco) is about to get married to Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), but she is stolen by an evil warlock (Justin Theroux) who wishes, you know, to sire a dragon with her.
The time has come: Thadeous has to man up. Act like aristocracy. Redeem himself. Off he embarks on a big ol’ quest alongside Fabious and valet Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), who plays Baldrick to his Blackadder. En route they team up with fearsome warrior Isabel (Portman). All that stands in their way is a paedophilic warlord, bare-breasted forest-dwellers acting as honeytraps, monsters galore, and the fact that Thadeous is a dope-smoking scaredy-pants.
What really stands in their way is that McBride, who co-wrote the script and who can be brilliant as a scene-stealer in films such as Tropic Thunder, is so cold and wooden. He delivers half-funny lines so contemptuously that they become zero-funny. He also seems to think that ending every other line with a bit of swearing is hilarious.
Perhaps everyone on set had a good time. Perhaps they were stoned. That would explain why the story is so lazy and full of holes, why key characters like Belladonna go missing for long stretches, why the action sequences are so half-cooked, why Franco appears to have modelled his Fabious on Joey from Friends. Really, how hilarious can a film be when its best comic performance comes from Natalie Portman?
The Welsh actress hinted at her illness in August, the month that her husband, Michael Douglas, was diagnosed with throat cancer.
Asked about her family life, she said: "I'm lucky, but that's not to say I don't get down on myself. I try and stay positive.
"I don't just bring myself down, I bring everyone around me down. It's like a dark cloud, 'Uh oh, here we go', and I have to snap out of it."
A month later, as Douglas was undergoing chemotherapy, she gave another emotional interview. "I can't bear even to watch him being treated.
"I know maybe I should be stronger but emotionally I just don't want to see the man I love hooked to a chemo IV or lying motionless on a radiation table under a positioning mask," she said.
Her fragility was evident during an appearance at the Ryder Cup golf tournament in south Wales in September, when she gave a tearful speech about her husband's recovery.
Zeta Jones, 41, was admitted to the Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut for five days earlier this month to be treated for Bipolar II disorder. The clinic specialises in treating psychiatric illnesses and substance abuse.
Her spokesman said the actress was now "in top form" and ready to begin work on her new film, Playing The Field. Her parents, Pat and Dai, were reported to have flown to the United States to help care for the couple's two children, Dylan, 10, and Carys, eight.
Douglas, 66, announced in January that his tumour had gone. However, the couple are also contending with the strain of a legal battle involving Douglas's former wife, Diandra, who is making a claim on his earnings.
Experts praised Zeta Jones for speaking about her diagnosis. Sue Baker, director of Time to Change, which combats the stigma surrounding mental illness, said: "By being so frank about her diagnosis and treatment, Catherine will have helped to lift some of the burden of stigma which causes so much damage to so many lives."
Prof Nick Craddock, the professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University School of Medicine, said: "It is very helpful in breaking down stigma when celebrities talk about their illness."
Even on the small screen, Tron: Legacy is a dazzling spectacle. The computer world of “The Grid” – somehow dark and bright simultaneously – is beautifully realised with a technical audacity that constantly tests the limits of what’s visually possible.
First-time director Joe Kosinski had been determined to get his hands on the very latest equipment and shot Tron Legacy on cameras more advanced even than those used by James Cameron on his groundbreaking Avatar, released only 12 months earlier.
But, curiously, what spoilt Cameron’s film also spoils Kosinski’s: neither has an engaging narrative.
In the same way that no one came out of Avatar wiping away tears of emotion, so the underwhelming plot of Tron:Legacy never grabs at the heart – even though the potential is there, as the twentysomething hero is reunited with the father he hasn’t seen for decades.
Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Flynn, the computer whiz sucked physically into the digital metropolis of The Grid, with its super-fast lightcycles and gladiatorial bouts fought with what look like neon-glowing Frisbees. Twenty years on, Flynn’s son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) unexpectedly finds himself in The Grid, where he encounters not only his old dad but also an evil – and much younger looking – clone of Flynn.
The visual effects are spectacular, but it’s hard to care what happens to anyone.
