A Formal Letter to Uwe Boll
Before I begin this review, which is in a rather different format than I’m used to, I would just like to ask anyone with access to Uwe Boll’s real email address to link him here, as this is a personal message to him from me. Thank you.
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Uwe Boll,
You have often been considered the worst living director. I honestly do not believe this to be so. That said, from a cinematic standpoint, your new film, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, was both an improvement upon your previous work and a disappointment. I am going to tell you what I think you did wrong, and what I think you did right. I will not attack you, and I will not proclaim detest for you. I just hope that you can take in what I’m telling you so that in the future, you can make better and better movies.
In the Name of the King has many problems, the biggest of which is the script. Much of the dialogue is hackneyed, unrealistic (even for the time in which the film is set) and at times laughably melodramatic. I am not alone in this notion – I’d say a sold 90% of the opening night audience was laughing at the same things I was. In the future, I would hope you would submit your scripts to several script analysts prior to investment in your pictures. You understand story structure, but your dialogue is awkward and unfocused, often going against your characters’ personalities or exaggerating them to unrealistic levels.
Characters are an important issue as well. I honestly didn’t feel the need to remember your characters’ names in this film. If I had tried to, I might have failed. As I saw it, everyone was there for a pre-determined purpose, to move the story along, and to fall to a predictable fate, whether they live or die. The characters’ names and motivations aren’t the only problem that they have in this film, though. Take Farmer, for example – He’s grown up in the fields, doing hard labor and growing strong… but that doesn’t explain why he is a better fighter than anyone in the King’s army. No back-story of any kind is given to explain Farmer’s spectacular acrobatic battling abilities, nor one to explain his possession of a seemingly magical boomerang. This item, at one time, hits a target and continues in its path back to Farmer’s hand. This is exciting, but completely infeasible in reality and again, no reason is given for Farmer’s having this item.
On several occasions, the picture quality is intentionally blurry, but on more than one occasion, establishing shots of the landscape are simply out of focus, and are quite upsetting to see in the finished film. An example of one such shot is when Solana is about to ring the war bell – the establishing shot of the hills here is simply, inexcusably out of focus. Similarly, when the arrows are first fired in the forest battle, we see the arrows spectacularly taking flight. This would be one of the finer shots in the film, but as the arrows make their descent, you have filmed them directly in front of the sun, so for several moments they completely disappear while the camera re-focuses to the changed lighting.
Curiously, in that same fight sequence, at one point the color palette completely changes from a fine, darker, more natural hue, to an abrasive, distracting yellowish-green, with positively no contextual reason to do so. This is something I notice sometimes in lower budget films with inexperienced directors, but for this to be by far your highest-budgeted feature and your eleventh completed directorial effort, it truly feels half-hearted, and is very upsetting to even the casual viewer.
You have a knack for getting significant, award-winning talent in your films, yet almost every performance in In the Name of the King is disappointing. Burt Reynolds gives, perhaps, the worst performance of his very long career as King Konreid. Every dramatic, non-comedic performance in the film makes it seem as though these somewhat legendary actors have reverted to being nothing more than a high school drama team.
It’s sad to see once-great actors like Reynolds and Ray Liotta give such terrible performances, and as the director, it was your job to correct them after bad takes… not to print them. If an actor is half-assing a take, tell them they should do it again with more feeling, or simply until it’s believable enough to be printed in a $60,000,000 movie. You’ve been blessed with an incredible amount of talent in your time, so you should take every opportunity to be the best director you can possibly be.
Back on characters for a moment, Gallian, your lead antagonist, says at one point that he is “Beyond Good and Bad,” and that they are “Childish ideas,” to him – that he is “[Changing the structure of things].” Having a character say these things is inconsequential unless they are true, and they frankly aren’t. Gallian is an incredibly one-dimensional, common villain, and having him say these things comes off like having a squirrel say he’s a chipmunk… it isn’t true simply because it is stated. Real character comes from the character themselves, and not their arbitrary dialogue.
Matthew Lillard’s performance was very funny. For me, he was the most enjoyable thing about the film. Some of the dialogue between characters was witty and allowed for some positive audience reaction (“Where you from?” in the dungeon, for instance).
Some of the effects in the film are very good, and some aren’t. The CGI is very effective most of the time, and shows some nice, fluid wonder… but there really isn’t too much else that can be said of In the Name of the King to justify its runtime. I understand the film was cut by about a half hour, so I apologize if some of my complaints might have been resolved in those scenes. Still, though, one of the film’s biggest problems is pacing, and it feels much longer than it actually is. The fact that much of the story and some nearly precise shots and sequences are taken from the Lord of the Rings films doesn’t help to win the audience over.
I hope that you can take these criticisms into account for your future projects. I hope that at some point you respond to these remarks and make a solid commitment to improve your work. This work, though, I’m afraid, is a failure.
"In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale" opens January 11, 2008 and is rated PG13. Fantasy. Directed by Uwe Boll. Written by Doug Taylor. Starring Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys Davies, Burt Reynolds, Ray Liotta.
