Your Highness (2011)

I need to start here: "Your Highness" (2011) bombed. It scored a 5.5/10 on IMDB and a 30% on Metacritic. 
It was made with a budget of $50 million and only earned $28 million back. 
It was, by all accounts, a failure. 
But it was a failure in the yesteryear of 2011. 

So let's think back to 2011: "Your Highness" hit theaters on 8 April, and "Game of Thrones" launched its pilot nine days later. I don't know what the theatrical landscape looked like at the time; I had only just started thinking about writing movie reviews back then, but surely anyone who caught the gritty seriousness of the Stark family's new plight with the Lannisters was immediately unimpressed with the ridiculous tale of Thadeous (Danny McBride) and Fabious (James Franco). 
"Game of Thrones" was raw and intense and included incest and attempted murder in the first episode. "Your Highness" was full of dick jokes. 
Compared to "Game of Thrones'" glorious golden spectacle, "Your Highness" was the village idiot who'd rolled in manure and expected a laugh. 
And then, thanks to two showrunners who apparently forgot every single detail of how to write a good story, character development, or a satisfying conclusion, "Game of Thrones" shat itself into oblivion and ruined everything fans loved over the course of the eight hours of season eight. 
By comparison, "Your Highness" now looks like an oiled-up Adonis on a pedestal. 

It is truly unfortunate that "Your Highness" came out when it did, because if Universal had access to a crystal ball and could see just where "Game of Thrones" was going to end up, they could have saved the theatrical release for 2021 and probably made an absolute killing (pandemic and all). 

If I haven't already used enough words to get there: this movie was literally a decade ahead of its time. 

The movie was about manchild Thadeous, living in what he perceived to be his brother's shadow of success. Later we learned that Fabious felt similarly about his brother's life of chill vibes. 
Fabious' betrothed, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), was kidnapped by the evil sorcerer Leezar (Justin Theroux) on their wedding day. Leezar wanted to fulfil a bizarre prediction that having sex with a virgin on the night of a lunar eclipse (specifically one moon eclipsing a second moon) would cause her to get pregnant with a dragon that he could then control. 
By itself that sounds ridiculous, but Danaerys laid three dragon eggs in "Game of Thrones," so... fair game. 

While adventuring, Fabious' best friend Boremont (Damian Lewis) - who was mad that he hadn't been picked to be the best man at the wedding the sorcerer crashed - and Julie (Toby Jones) - a weird, genital-less, magic-casting underling - were revealed to be stooges working for Leezar, who turned on Fabious and Thadeous and Thadeous' servant Courney (Rasmus Hardiker), pushing their already dangerous adventure to the sorcerer's lair to even more perilous depths. 

Along the way, they encountered a bizarre forest cult of murderous naked people who followed a man who could spawn monsters by pushing his hand into a giant vat of mustard. It sounds weird, and it was weird to watch him do, but major bonus points for creativity - he created a hand-hydra that, when defeated, resulted in him losing his actual fingers. I've never seen a villain/monster in a movie that worked out that way, so it was absolutely a novelty to relish. 
The trio also met Isabel (Natalie Portman), a lone wanderer with her own quests and ambitions. It was clear that her character was designed after the "woman to be won because the man 'proved' himself" trope, but they then broke the mold and didn't actually do that. 

Now, being a movie with Danny McBride and James Franco (before we learned that Franco is apparently a weird, creepy dude with too much money and influence), the movie was mostly drug and dick jokes, which they definitely leaned into, but somehow it never felt like too much. There were some bits that felt like they might have dragged on for too long, but nothing ever felt like it crossed the line. 
There was an long, extended (ugh) sight-gag about a minotaur's penis, but after watching "Sorry to Bother You" (2018) with its gratuitous horse-penis scenes and commentary, this was actually far more palatable. 

But here's where the movie really shines: the scenery. 
This movie was drop-dead gorgeous. 
It had "Lord of the Rings"-esque flyovers and wide shots of stunning mountain ranges and valleys. I don't know where they filmed this, but their location scouts did a bang-up job. 
The CGI effects were... okay. First, this movie was from 2011, so there's some bad aging going on there, and then there's the fact that I think they blew a lot of the production budget on flying to awesome locales, so I'm willing to forgive that. 

The music was good too. 
Not great - nothing to parallel "Stardust" (2007) or "Lord of the Rings" (2001) - but it was suitably epic for the background, like an amped-up version of what you'd hear at a Renaissance Fair. And for a movie set in an “epic quest” premise, they did an awful lot better than “Onward” (2019).

This movie was R-rated, and absolutely earned it thanks to all of the naked people, drugs, and gore, but none of it felt out of place. This was an adult round of D&D, complete with everything that an adult would be interested in putting into such a fictional realm. 

I'm not particularly surprised that this crashed in 2011, but again: I think if it were to come out now, it would have received much more positive reviews. 
It's on Netflix and it's worth your time. 
Just not with kids.