In the Name of the King: Two Worlds

Uwe Boll is the stuff of legends, he's a director so detested that he's become one of those things that is trendy to hate. People slate him and rate his movies without even seeing them and I find that a damn shame.

The trouble with Boll is he doesn't have a style, you watch a Bruckheimer/Bay/Spielberg/Nolan etc film you can tell it's one of theres whereas Boll has no identity beyond his love of adapting video games.

I personally don't think the hatred is justified, yes he's done some stinkers and yes the man himself is a lunatic but he has done some very enjoyable films as well.

In The Name Of The King (2007) wasn't one of them, but it was passable. This sequel however is a cliched mess.

It was doomed from the outset, Lungren turned the roll down and only later changed his mind due to his divorce and financial situation. So immediatly you have a leading man who doesn't want to be there, and was vocal about this fact.

To make matters worse Lungren injured himself on the first day of filming, this is evident throughout the movie as he is barely mobile and has a nasty limp.

The film itself is a highly cliched tale involving a man who is dragged through time and forced to fullfill a prophecy. Yeah, exactly.

The Good:

Natalie Burn & Aleks Paunovic

CGI is better than expected

The Bad:

Script is poor

Stupidly cliched

Lungrens injury is blatant

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Every fantasy movie needs a black forest from which no man has ever made out alive!

The first In the Name of the King movie was a bit silly, but not bad as sword and sorcery stuff goes - and Uwe somehow got a whole cast full of real actors to and decent enough effects people to work on it.

This abomination, on the other hand, was so terrible that I, who can usually find some value is just about anything, gave up in disgust after that first half hour or so - life is too short to waste time on stuff this bad.

Even Dolph Lundgren, who can usually do a fair impersonation of a wall, was given absolutely nothing to work with here - and I'd never heard of anybody else in the cast.

Rewatching the original In the Name of the King is a much better use of your time than trying to watch this thing.

I loved the first one with Statham, so I had at least some hopes for this one. I was sadly mistaken. While the plot for the movie had a good amount of promise, Dolf's acting and the directors' directing left much to be desired. The unknown supporting cast actually performed their parts fairly, but Dolf plodded through his. Get a much better director, a bigger budget and someone like Liam Neeson to play the lead and this movie could be quite good. If you have a choice between doing the laundry or this, get your clothes cleaned. What cgi there was in the movie was so so. The choice of scenery, or location of the film if you may, was quite nice. I think the worst parts were that Dolf wasn't very heroic, camera was jittery like a hand-held and the plot twists were weak at best.

It amazes me that people are still giving this guy money to make movies. He has yet again demonstrated that he should never ever ever make another movie again. The story was probably one of the worst ideas he has had yet. After the last movie with a great cast being, yet another, total let down I didn't have high expectations on this one. Even with the extremely low expectations I had going in to this one it was worse than I could possibly imagine. The acting was mediocre, and the overall plot was not interesting at all. I was ashamed that Dolf even took the part in this movie.

Save your money and don't bother with this.

A sequel with only a tenth of the budget of its predecessor obviously doesn't stand a chance in the comparison. Instead of Burt Reynolds as a king facing an army of 1000 Orcs in leather armour, you get some unknown young man as a king with an army of 20 extras in black cotton. The fortress looks like anyone could destroy it on a Monday morning. The dragon shows some professional CGI effects, one rare point that exceeds the expectations. Nevertheless, if you decide to do a fantasy movie when you are forced to make many restrictions, either the story and characters must save the day (like in 'Warrior Angels'), or you make uncompromising, hilarious trash (such as 'Barbarian Queen'). In "Two Worlds", neither of these two possibilities is accomplished, it must be said.

Movies where fantasy heroes are traveling to the modern age (from 'Beastmaster 2' to 'Masters of the Universe') are usually cheesy. They fortunately tried the other way around here and moved a modern day hero to the distant past: Dolph Lundgren. As Granger the Stranger, he has unusual things to worry about, like drinking water probably full of bacteria, and he certainly has no respect for kings and witches. Natassia Malthe gets the funniest part, which must have been a nice change for her after the Bloodrayne stuff: she is a doctor trying to find out more about the medicine of the future. The story is well paced, so the 90 minutes passed quickly, but I was left with a feeling that I didn't quite get what I expected.