Movie: Knights of Badassdom (2013)
Over the past few years, Live Action Role Playing, just like Cosplay, has gained more popularity and isn’t quite the niche activity it once was. This may well explain the number of films that use this scene as their basis that have appeared relatively recently, such as Lloyd the Conqueror and Unicorn City.
The plot is standard fare, with a relatively typical B-movie setup: Joe (Ryan Kwanten) is dumped by his girlfriend and his roommates Hung (Peter Dinklage) and Eric (Steve Zahn) get him drunk and drag him along to a Live Action Role Playing event. Once there and taking part against his will, Joe has to help save the day after Eric accidentally summons a real demon.
Generally, the setup is what you’d expect and is just used as a vehicle for all the usual nods and winks to a nerdy audience. In some ways, it is too ‘hammy’ and knowing for its own good. Too much cheese can be a bad thing when you don’t ‘go for it’ completely. This is neither a full on gross-out/schlocky comedy horror like a Troma film or a serious big budget comedy.
Falling between those stools is a problem. I like many, many Troma films and in some regards they would have been better off going down this route. At least then some of the uneasiness would have been lessened, as you would have expected the naffness in some areas. Instead, the film is awkward, in a bad way, and looks like a missed opportunity. Especially, when you look at the cast list.
As well as Dinklage, Kwanten and Zahn, you also get appearances from Summer Glau, W. Earl Brown (Deadwood), Joshua Malina (West Wing, Scandal), Michael Gladis (Mad Men), Margarita Levieva (Revenge, How To Make It In America), Jimmi Simpson (House Of Cards), Danny Pudi (Community) and Tom Hopper (Merlin). This is not a B-movie cast, so I would expect something of far greater substance than what we got. To a certain extent, the cast are left to create depth where not a lot exists from a drama point of view, and neither is this a flat out belly laugh comedy. They do an admirable job of trying to piece together something, but it does seem like a couple of them are unsure why they’re there and are left trying to play along anyway.
To be fair, there are some nice touches in here and it is not all without merit, as some elements do work and there are some laughs to be had. It seems from looking into the behind the scenes story that there was great disagreement between the Director, Producers and production company, so maybe this is just a shadow of what it could have been. For this reason, I hope that Director Joe Lynch gets the last laugh in the long run.
Overall, this felt like a B-movie that had been populated with actors of a higher calibre than you would expect, who were in it based on the current popularity of the scene. This may be unfair and those involved could well be big fans of LARPing, but as a whole it didn’t totally work for me. There definitely seemed to be a mismatch between the talent of the cast and the quality of the material. Counter-intuitive as it may be, if the cast had been more of a standard B-movie cast, there would have been more of a collective charm about the film that I would prefer. In this mismatched form, I was just left a little disappointed.