A Year of Garbage Movies #77, “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale” (2007)
I really didn’t expect there to be any movies on this list that I actually enjoyed, and I never in a million years would have guessed that it would be an Uwe Boll film, but here we are. The internet, however, feels that I am wrong in this opinion.
This movie was basically The Lord of the Rings, but if it had been made by the SyFy channel. It tanked at the box office, and is the only large budget film that Boll has made.
The general plot is that Jason Statham, Ron Perlman and some other guys basically re-enact the burning of Rohan from The Two Towers. They must fight Shaggy and an imitation version of Wayne Newton who are trying to take over the kingdom ruled by Burt Reynolds.
Now admittedly, the entire budget went toward the cast, because the special effects are television-level. As I said, the script is extremely similar to the Lord of the Rings. Burt Reynolds also delivers all of his dialogue as if he were moments from drifting off to sleep.
Apparently there are sequels, which I fully expect to be exactly the kind of movie Uwe Boll is known for though they are not on this list. I’m unfamiliar with the original video game series, so I can’t speak to how closely it follows those, and I suspect that may contribute to why I’m better disposed toward this movie than everyone else seems to be.
I don’t really have any other Pros and Cons so I’m just going to list other comparisons that can be made to the Lord of the Rings
- This is the movie your grandma would have accidentally gotten you for Christmas because “she knows you like those elf kings movies”
- This is the Luke Wilson of Lord of the Rings movies
- This movie is the result of feeding the script from Lord of the Rings into Google Translate, translating it to Romanian, then translating the Romanian back into English 3 or 4 times
- This is better than The Hobbit movies. I realize that’s not in the spirit of this list but it needed to be said.
