If you ever saw Boogie Nights, you'll remember the scene where Burt Reynolds sits in an editing room with Ricky Jay, looking over the closing footage of his masterwork, the first Brock Landers/Chest Rockwell action porno where Mark Wahlberg and...
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If you ever saw Boogie Nights, you'll remember the scene where Burt Reynolds sits in an editing room with Ricky Jay, looking over the closing footage of his masterwork, the first Brock Landers/Chest Rockwell action porno where Mark Wahlberg and John C. Reilly share some of the most amazing dialogue written by man. At one point, Reynolds hopefully states out loud, "This is the one. This is the one they're going to remember me for." While watching In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, you can actually hear Uwe Boll uttering the same words somewhere amid all the clumsy high fantasy action sequences and hammed-to-the-hilt acting.

It's fitting, then, that Burt Reynolds is in A Dungeon Siege Tale, as a stately faux-English king, at that. That's just one of many astonishing bits of casting in this film adaptation of a middling action RPG. Jason Statham plays the lead, a farmer named...well, Farmer, who finds himself caught in the middle of a battle between Reynolds' kindom of Ebb (not Gondor) and an evil race known as the Krug (not orcs) led by an evil wizard (not Sarumon). That evil wizard is played by, of all people Ray Liotta, who seems like the only one in on the joke as he cackles like he's been on a two-day cocaine binge and dresses like he's in the wizardly equivalent of the trenchcoat mafia.

It gets better. Farmer's son is murdered by the not-orcs, and his wife, played by Claire Forlani (who at one point looks like she ages about 15 years over the course of one scene, without the aid of special effects) is kidnapped. Farmer sets out about his revenge, but not before encountering a number of other amazingly casted characters.

Leelee Sobieski (looking off-puttingly mannish) arrives to play the brooding daughter of Jonathan Rhys-Davies' good wizard (he's been in one of the movies this one shamelessly rips off—he should know better). Ron Pearlman severely tests whatever goodwill he might have amassed from his Hellboy role by playing…well, a medieval fantasy version of himself for a while before dying a rather incoherent death. Kristianna Lokken shows up intermittently as some sort of lesbian tree nymph that can inexplicably control vines like she'd been reading Scott Smith's The Ruins religiously. And Matthew Lillard, sweet, sweet Matthew Lillard, takes on the role of the comically evil duke who wants to unseat the king and take power for himself. Lillard looks like he got good and liquored up before each shoot, channeling a mixture of his psycho-schtick from the end of Scream and Dudley Moore circa Arthur.

The only person on this cast of the damned who gets something of a pass is Brian White, the leader of Reynolds' army and pretend-Faramir. His previous roles include the direct-to-video Bring It On: In It To Win It and the role of Zack in the DOA movie. You can't tarnish a career that doesn't exist. If anything, this is a major step up.

White aside, I'm always amazed at Boll's ability to draw actors that have been in legitimate films into his web of cinematic deceit, especially as his catalog of garbage grows and more and more people should be figuring out exactly what his scam is. It's not like the script offers anything but gigantic alarm bells that this whole thing is a disaster. The plot is indecipherable. Reynolds' stately king (I never get tired of saying that) is fighting Liotta's not-Sarumon for reasons never explained. Statham spends a lot of time unemotionally mugging for the camera and spouting one-liners, making you wonder if they ever had a vision of this character beyond “What if the dude from the video game was the guy from The Transporter? That'd be awesome, right?� Lillard flops around for the camera like a foppish mental patient as he screeches about becoming the next king, King Burt Reynolds periodically says something that's supposed to sound dignified yet sounds deep-fried coming out of his morbidly stretched mouth (he evidently filmed this immediately after having plastic surgery, and looks sort of like F. Murray Abraham in Star Trek: Insurrection) and Liotta is saddled with dialogue that belongs in a Mr. Show sketch about evil wizards.

Periodically, there are battles—wildly incoherent battles that seem to take place within a twenty foot by twenty foot grid of forest where opposing captains seem to be standing within loud talking distance and can apparently kill one another rather easily. The not-orcs look rubbery, and the actors playing them were apparently told to study tapes of the putty underlings from the first run of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for inspiration regarding their characters' movement. Fantastic.

The worst part is that at times, Boll skates on the line of competence with the cinematography. Clearly he spent a great deal of time studying his Lord of the Rings director's cut DVDs, looking for big sweeping mountain shots he could plug in using his filming license in the Canadian rockies. At one point a few of the heroes saunter up to the dark, lava-surrounded castle owned by Liotta, and from the ridiculous panning shots and almost unmanageably malevolent soundtrack, you halfway expect Sean Bean to run up and nervously yell out, "One does not simply walk into Mordor!" Though maybe that's giving the film's atmosphere and effects a bit too much credit. The CG castles and soldiers are uniformly hysterical and look about as natural as Burt Reynolds' face.

I could prattle on about the epileptic editing and ripped-straight-from-the-video-game soundtrack, but after a while I'd just start repeating myself. It's abundantly clear from the opening moments of In the Name of the King where this thing is headed, as Liotta shoves his tongue down the throat of a vaguely confused looking Sobieski, the two of them stopping every now and again to flat-read lines that George Lucas would find embarrassing.

I'm not surprised that In the Name of the King sucks—I celebrate that fact. This is as entertaining a piece of **** as Boll has ever produced. He has been getting more and more serious with each picture, and thus been inching closer and closer to making movies that are legitimately funny, precisely because of how seemingly serious he takes this junk. In a way, Boll wouldn't be too far off calling In the Name of the King his most memorable work—it will likely stand as the funniest thing the guy ever made. Especially when you take a look at the trailer for his upcoming attempt at legitimate comedy, Postal. Yeesh.