Re-Do

I was thinking while watching "In The Name Of The King" about what I would do to fix it. Often when I entertain these thoughts, it's some relatively minor stuff- largely matters concerning the script. These are, then, small and cheap fixes so long as they are made in time. With this film, as it drew on I became convinced that larger and larger measures would be necessary if anything was ever to have been made of this awful piece of work.

I hardly know whether to begin with the casting or the script. Both are egregiously bad. I suppose the word comes first. I'll say first that there came a moment when the good guys had triumphed in battle and Statham was have a tender moment with the wounded king that I assumed the film was about to be over. This was nearly at the 90 minute mark, which is where I reasonably though a film like this one would end. A big budget fantasy film could go long, but a cheap one is like a bomber that made the trip from Germany all the way to London during the blitz: you just don't have long to make an impact. What I thought was the closing scene turned out to have about forty minutes more behind it, and when I learned that I was TRULY demoralized.

Obviously the film needed to be tighter, and probably simpler. You do expect fantasy films to have expansive worlds and layered mythologies, with all kinds of characters populating them. I don't see how that works here. You have Statham, who plays a farmer with a complicated backstory as an orphan. His son is killed and his wife kidnapped when ork-like creatures attack all over the kingdom at the behest of a restive heir to the throne who is conspiring with some kind of evil wizard.

Then there's the daughter of the king's right hand man, who's been having an affair with the wizard, the farmer's best friend/adoptive father, the people of the forest, and a whole host of other characters. I would probably get rid of most of them, and most of that plot. I don't dislike the basic idea of a humble farmer turning hero with a modest goal of recovering his family. Maybe he's someone who could have been a soldier, but has that much more of an arc because he never was.

This burly, humble farmer's home is attacked and his family taken from him. Someone's left alive to rescue, and he seeks the aid of his kingdom. Maybe they are no help, but some soldier- an officer, maybe- turns rogue out of sympathy. This could be an old friend of the farmer. You forget all about the farmer's orphan backstory. It's a needless complication, just as is the conspiracy between the wizard and the king's nephew, although I don't dislike that element a ton. It's just an element I don't think the film has the resources to feed. Instead, I think you have a kind of a power struggle between the king and our farmer's friend, who we'll say is a power player of some kind angling to replace a no longer fit king.

So, you have a wizard and this ork-like army operating on its own. They aspire to rule, and nobody but our tragic farmer and his friend take seriously the threat, which couples with the taking of our farmer's wife to former a pretty reasonable dramatic conflict. Act one establishes our hero's idyllic life, the kingdom's strength and conflict, and our villain's strength and evil intent, which comes in the form of an attack on the farmer's village that sets him into action.

The second act connects our farmer with his military friend, whose efforts to get action on the evil wizard issue are frustrated by the king. Our other power player wants to help, but can't. The farmer goes off on his own, reaching a dire moment in a failed attempt at rescuing the wife from the wizard's lair. Things come to a head back at the kingdom, and our farmer's military friend now has the wherewithal to aid his friend. He takes his army out to meet the threat, but as about the same time they arrive our farmer gets free.

The farmer gets his wife, getting her in safety to help the military friend, who himself is now in some kind of trouble. You of course have to have the protagonist be chiefly responsible for the victory. He kills the wizard, the kingdom's army dispatches the orks, the farmer has a chance to seek riches and glory in the service of the kingdom but returns with his wife to the farm, secure in the knowledge that our virtuous military man will rule justly.

What I've laid out may not be a great story, but I like to think it's not too complicated, and if it's not so original or grand, it's at least reliable. For a small budget, I think that's best. You take a basic, compelling story and hope to enliven it with some promising but nameless actors. That's what I would do, anyway. Of course, you can't do too much with the actors the film's got. We're going to have to start almost from scratch.

Almost none of the principal cast members is anything less than very wrong for the role. Notable exceptions include Matthew Lillard as the feckless, traitorous nephew. The king, I should say is Burt Reynolds. He, lead Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, and basically every other male actor in the film couldn't play a fantasy role under any conceivable circumstances. Claire Forlani is fine as the farmer's wife, and I get the idea that Lillard was having good fun. I cut his role, so maybe we slide him over to the wizard role. We hang onto those to, and after that the slate is clean.

The technical side of things is not great, but I don't think that's crippling except for the cinematography. If we got one of my friends in there, it would be better right away. The effects are lousy, but skewing more practical would maybe help. My answers for this aspect of things are not really very good, but if nothing was improved but the way the film was shot, that would probably be enough to neutralize the liability that the tech side is.

Now I have put a tremendous amount of thought into fixing In the Name Of The King (which would probably need a new title), and one might wonder why. I wonder a little myself. Enough is wrong with it that I'd frankly rather call this a whole different movie, but if we're just talking about why any effort should be made to come up with a good movie when the whole thing is a Uwe Boll tax dodge, I can only say that decent people have some sense of pride. If you're making a B-level fantasy film, you've got to do your damnedest to make the best B-level fantasy film you can. it's the only way to live with pride and joy.