Hitler on the Roof?

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2008)

Rating ... C (42)

Uwe Boll may the greatest universal punching bag since Dan Quayle but his four English language films have each taken baby steps away from his D-grade debut with House of the Dead (a technical travesty by any standard but at least among the funniest bad movies in recent memory until The Wicker Man stole its thunder) and in his most recent, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, Boll continues the trend. The guy may still need marked improvement when it comes to coaxing performances out of paycheck-collecting cast members (Dungeon Siege is unintentionally its own spoiler because the weakest actors fail to obscure that they're also the most treacherous), creating legitimate drama, or deriving narrative significance but his newest movie is once again his peak, meaning that even if the hopelessly generic is best he can offer, his pinnacle is now less pathetic than that of Michael Bay (during The Island, there were actually moments that did not contain overwrought histrionics or the effects of incendiary devices), M. Night Shyamalan (also putting on his best show in his most recent The Happening - too bad he's yet to elevate himself from unintentional comedy), and Todd Solondz. (The most tolerable and least offensive part of each of the three movies I've seen by him continues to be the darkest part of the ending fade-out.)

In the eyes of Boll, the world needed another lackluster post-LotR, or he needed more funds. (His movies are still German tax shelters, and he comes out ahead whether or not the film does at the box office. To be clear, unlike the American versions of the 80's, this isn't illegal - just indicative of his laughable inadequacy.) Like House of the Dead and Bloodrayne, the video game source material (I don't have any first-hand experience with Dungeon Siege, though reputedly it's a Diablo clone with an added "bonus" of an autopilot setting) is thematically thin, allowing ample opportunity for amateur screenwriting clichés to fill in the gaps. Jason Statham plays a guy simply named Farmer (a case of easy abstraction - Vault Dweller this isn't), a pacifist patriarch who asks nothing more than his hometown doesn't get pillaged by not-Orcs. It does, and he journeys cross-country with a couple pals to track down his kidnapped wife. Numerous Lord of the Rings hand-me-downs occur including inexplicable magic, passive forest dwellers, and extreme long shots of the group in transit while when the inevitable battles arrive Boll opts for irritating mid-sequence wipes that suffocatingly emphasize the two-dimensionality of his shots and refuse the viewer the privelige of spatial navigation. Also present of the director's trademarks are his momentary flashbacks, which are still amusing in their convenient punctuality but nevertheless more smoothly woven into the narrative fold because the dialogue doesn't explicitly set them up. Unfortunately the film's clunker plotline (the parochial Statham doesn't give a flip about his country, only his wife ... until it's forseeably proven to live peacefully with his wife he sort of requires a country, and not an evil dominion) heavily outweighs what few decent scenes exist (Boll's first use of imagery - Leelee Sobieski gazes into a pulsating reflective surface predictably to signify emotional dubiety ... from her point of view though, it's probably better than getting kicked into one a la the aforementioned The Wicker Man), and in vain compensation Boll turns to Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings for aid. While House of the Dead was a product of post-Matrix-ism, In the Name of the King is similarly post-Lord of the Rings (this was Alone in the Dark's one defining attribute - it felt like a failure all Boll's own) to no avail, other than the wildly metaphorical. Is the reluctant-to-fight Farmer a stand-in for Uwe Boll, content to dispense schlock for personal and financial gratification, only stooping to challenge his critics to boxing matches when justly provoked? If you believe that, I'd be willing to sell you some tickets to Boll's upcoming Broadway smash: Hitler on the Roof.