John Rhys-Davies (why, Gimli, why?) and Burt Reynolds in ITNOTK:ADST.Courtesy of Brightlight Pictures
Uwe Boll’s ‘In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale’ Is the Movie of the Year
It’s enough to make you despair for our culture. While a handful of elitist snobs wax pretentious about There Will Be Blood, while a bunch of geeks swap Cloverfield theories, while a bunch of freakin’ women laugh and cry at Juno, the film event of the millennium is about to pass us by virtually unnoticed. That’s right, pinheads: We’re talking about In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.
ITNOTK:ADST is the latest offering from Germany’s legendary filmmaker Uwe Boll, who has been called everything from “a modern Ed Wood” to “such a bad director”, but no matter how many bizarre interviews he gives, how many deranged e-mails he sends, or how many critics he boxes, his nonstop energy for adapting video games into ramshackle feature films funded by German tax loopholes never seems to flag.
But even in the annals of Uwe Boll follies, ITNOTK:ADST looks to be something special.
Boll scraped together 60 million tax-loophole dollars to lure a cast of (mostly) shamefaced has-beens like Leelee Sobieski, Burt Reynolds, and Claire Forlani to star in this baldly obvious Lord of the Rings ripoff that, title aside, appears to contain neither a dungeon nor a siege. A boringly well-cut official trailer currently making the rounds disgracefully conceals all the best parts, including Matthew Lillard’s histrionic overacting and the fact that Ray Liotta, as the main villain, appears to be wearing his street clothes. To truly understand why ITNOTK:ADST is the most important film of 200-anything, this trailer is the one to see. It may be nearly12,000 minutes long, but if you watch it all the way to the end, you too will know that anyone who misses this classic-in-the-making can’t claim to truly care about film.
So that’s why, this Friday, you know where we’ll be: I-T-N! O-T-K! A-D-S-T! —Mac Rogers
Uwe Boll’s ‘In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale’ Is the Movie of the Year