Dungeon Siege, the game, revolved entirely around stabbing things and burning them with arcane magic. It was somehow less cerebral than the Diablo series, the finest games ever based around an experiment to determine how long it takes for repetitive stress injuries to develop in index fingers. According to everything I just said, turning the title into a braindead popcorn flick rife with semi-nude women, explosive pyrotechnics and vaguely Arthurian dialogue should be right up the alley of absolutely any hack in Hollywood with enough cognitive ability to open his Powerbook.
Then, along came Herr Boll.
Hit the jump if you wanna read extended impressions courtesy of AICN from a gentleman who was brave enough to witness the whole thing, or if you’re impatient I can sum it up with this quote:
This movie blows. Hard. I mean extremely hard. So hard, that I hope it destroys Uwe Balls career.
Alright, so it’s terrible, but so is Mansquito and living life without having seen that Sci Fi Channel classic is just unthinkable at this point. Does Dungeon Siege: In The Name Of The King at least manage to be so-bad-it’s-good? Apparently not. Boll definitely left his flaming, bloody signature in the flesh of this thing:
He managed to take a 60 million dollar budget, and still make it look like shit. He had 150 minutes at his disposal, yet developed no one. He had a bunch of pretty good actors, and turned them into jokes. The only ones to come out of this unscathed is Statham, Perlman, and Davis who are pretty okay in this. Liotta and Reynolds get it the worst. Liotta seems to pretend that he didn’t have a career and just completely ham it up to an infinite degree. Reynolds just looked like he didn’t want to be here, so much so, that he wears a t-shirt during his *SPOILER BUT I DON’T CARE!* death scene.
I’ve always been impressed by how he seems to infect his actors with his personal brand of suck, but to have castrated Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds is a whole new level of directorial incompetence. How you manage to take a guy who’s best known as a violent Italian stereotype and a classic actor best known for his moustache and make them both unentertaining is an accomplishment worthy of a little oval popping up at the bottom of the screen and awarding Uwe 25 gamer points.
But … like … the conclusion makes everything worthwhile right?
So the film pretty much ends like you expect it to end. Farmer is attacked by books, and Gallian gets stabbed by Farmer’s wife, giving Farmer the edge to kill him. Gallian dies, and the monsters he controlled walk off to jump off a cliff or something. Farmer and wife kiss, and Uwe Bolls name pops up like it means something. Cue boos and me writing down “Poor” on the screening paper.
I want that to be some kind of provocative social commentary or a bit of insight on the human condition, but I don’t even f&%^ing know what it means. He’s attacked by books? Why? Are they angry books? Did Uwe Boll option their film rights? I just don’t get it.
Hopefully this has saved you the ten ducats you’d spend on seeing this thing in theaters as a “goof” or because you’re trying to revive traditional Hebrew self-loathing, but how many of you were actually going to see this anyway? You’ll manage to catch it on the Sci Fi Channel a year or two from now, but after ten minutes, you will begin to wonder why they couldn’t have reran Roger Corman’s Dinocroc or Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis instead.
