The Duke (1999)
1/10
A Royal Sucking
22 December 2013
Friends, beware. This movie is bad. Really bad. Like there are no ways in which this film is not bad. Where shall I begin?

Perhaps the camera work? To put it bluntly, the whole movie seems as if it were filmed by a cheap Dollar Tree Kodak smashed to the wall with a piece of moist bubble gum. I got a crick in my neck trying to understand the bizarre angles that these directors evidently thought were "artistic." The acting? Horrific. What back alley did they scour to find these wretched excuses for thespians? If any one of them found a penny on their way to the set, they'd be grossly overpaid. The plot? What plot? The plot had as many holes as the inexplicably pot-hole filled, overused driveway "joke" from the film. It seems as if the directors picked up a cheap copy of The Idiots Guide to Movie Clichés (much of which would have gone over their heads) and utilized every page. Twice. The movie has about as much continuity and clarity as an ADD 5-year-old in a crayon shop. The whole movie makes you feel as if you have just missed a previous scene.

I've never witnessed a film where every single character elicited such disgust and revulsion. It's like it didn't let up. They failed at even playing normal human beings. It might as well have been filmed with Martians. I mean, a dog is crowned the Duke of Dingwall. (A fitting name...) And what do the inhabitants of this bizarre little town do (who are so often mentioned and yet so rarely seen, except when portrayed by repeat actors from previous scenes...)? They applaud the whole way!

I won't even venture into the awful "sloppy-joe" sequence. Such a banal and iniquitous perversion of the art of cinema should never even have been thought of.

In sum, this movie was not worth the 8 seconds it takes to put the DVD into the player. It is a monument to how far a few desperate actors and "filmmakers" will go to make a buck or two. Which is evidently pretty far. Pretty much, the only difference between this film and a bucket of garbage is the bucket.
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