In the Name of the King – A Dungeon Siege (2007, directed by Uwe Boll)
Reflections on the Film
- Did Uwe Boll overreach here, trying to play in Lord of the Rings territory without the infrastructure or script discipline to support it?
- Was the cast too big / too many stars for a film whose script perhaps didn’t support them (i.e. “star box office can’t cover script holes”)?
- Did reliance on the tax shelter funding give Boll a kind of “blank check” overconfidence?
- Could the film have been more salvageable with a tighter edit (e.g. cutting some side plots or characters) or more restrained ambitions?
- Is it possible that some of the production was already compromised (effects, reshoots, broken logic) and the final version is the least bad version they could cobble together?
Basics / Credits / Box Office / Reception
- In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) is directed by Uwe Boll, based loosely on the Dungeon Siege video game.
- Main cast includes Jason Statham (as Farmer / Camden Konreid), Leelee Sobieski, Claire Forlani, John Rhys-Davies, Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Matthew Lillard, et al.
- Budget: approximately USD $60 million
- Box Office: a disaster. Worldwide gross was about USD $13.1 million (or somewhere in that range) versus the large budget.
- In the U.S. it opened with ~$2.98 million, and domestic total ended up ~$4.78 million.
- The film was heavily panned by critics. Metacritic score of ~15/100 (i.e. “overwhelming dislike”).
- Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus: “wooden performances, laughable dialogue, shoddy production values,” etc.
- Awards / nominations: it was nominated for multiple Razzies (Worst Film, Worst Screenplay, Worst Supporting Actor [Burt Reynolds], Worst Supporting Actress [Leelee Sobieski]). Uwe Boll actually won Worst Director.
- After this flop, Boll publicly said he was done (for the moment) with big-budget productions.
- “Boll claimed (in pre-release interviews) that Statham could do almost all his own stunts, which was a big plus when staging flips, hanging in harness, etc. Did you see any artifacts of that (e.g. shaky doubles, odd cuts) in the action sequences?”
- “According to lore, the script was being rewritten mid-shoot to avoid Lord of the Rings comparisons, with reshoots and scene shifts. Did you sense structural inconsistencies, dropped threads, or weird transitions that might reflect that pressure?”
- “There’s a rumor that Burt Reynolds fainted in armor and missed some days of filming. Do you detect any scenes where his posture/energy slips or where he feels disconnected from the rhythms of the film?”
- “The director has publicly said he will release a much longer director’s cut with extra arcs (e.g. more Matthew Lillard, more of Reynolds’ king scenes) to patch logic gaps. Do you think there’s enough in the theatrical version to hint at what might have been added?”
- “Did you feel like the VFX / CGI in some scenes fell off a cliff (or shifted ‘tone’ halfway) — which might align with stories of replacing houses mid-production?”
- “Did you notice any weird ‘gross prop effects’ (e.g. weird potions, medicine, makeups) that felt like they might’ve been designed to provoke actor reactions?”
- German Tax Shelter Financing One of the biggest production stories is how Boll was able to raise big money through German tax shelter funds (film investment schemes in Germany). That is, investors could use tax incentives to pour money into film projects. But after King’s disastrous performance, that model became unsustainable. Boll later remarked that he’d have to revert to more conventional financing (pre-sales, smaller budgets). In fact, King is often cited as Boll’s last “big budget” financed via those now-defunct tax shelter mechanisms.
- Budget & P&A / Prints & Advertising Some sources say the P&A (prints & advertising) was about USD $20 million, which in a film already struggling is a huge extra cost burden. Boll reportedly used these tax shelter funds to cover both production and P&A, tying the entire financing to the scheme.
- Filming location & extras The movie was shot near Sooke, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Locals and First Nations people in the area were recruited as extras and to help with logistics. Effects work was spread across multiple VFX houses (Elektrofilm, The Orphanage, Frantic Films, Rocket Science, etc.).
- On adapting Dungeon Siege / retitling / scope“Dungeon Siege is based on the video game Dungeon Siege, but only loosely basically, and that’s the reason we changed the title to In the Name of the King … it’s more an epic adventure.”
“I think there are two movies; there are two movies standing out. One is now In the Name of the King because of the size … All the actors worked so good together … from this perspective definitely my favorite movie.” — Use: ask Mike whether, after watching, he feels “epic adventure” was plausible, or whether Boll oversold scale vs. execution.
- On the “director’s cut” / longer DVD version“What other people can see … is my director’s cut, … a special DVD that is almost three hours long where you see a little more from the surrounding actors like Matthew Lillard … and so on.” — Possible question: Does Mike think extra runtime might’ve allowed plot threads (Lillard, for instance) to feel less tacked on?
- On his reputation, critics & double standards“I have a bad reputation … a lot of reviewers have me on their bad list forever … A lot of times I am mentioned … ‘they are total videogame based movies, like the shitty Uwe Boll movies.’”
- “The accepted opinion is that you make bad films, and everyone has to have that opinion. … The accepted opinion … needs to mention me, every article is like ‘Uwe Boll is even worse.’”
- — Use: you can confront Mike: does he feel Boll is “irreparably boxed in” by critics, or is there any reclaiming possible?
- Defending production / “A-list standards” In a 2007 Wired interview (not specific to King but relevant), Boll defended himself against outright accusations of being Ed Wood:“Everything in Postal, everything in Blackwood, everything in In The Name of the King is Hollywood A-list standard. I have the same crew of I, Robot. The same crew! … If you write that the movies look like amateur trash movies, then you are lying on purpose.” — Use: highlight this when you question whether the production values (sets, VFX, costumes) actually support that claim, or where they fall short.
Bottom Five Kings
Tonight’s movie In the Name of the King, which might just feature the worst royal casting choices ever put on screen. On one side you’ve got Burt Reynolds — the Bandit himself — wandering around a fantasy kingdom like he took a wrong turn off the interstate, reading his lines as though Camelot had a teleprompter. On the other, Matthew Lillard as his shrieking, twitchy heir who stomps around like a Ren Faire reject before simply disappearing from the movie with no explanation. Between Burt’s sleepwalking king and Lillard’s vanished prince, we realized cinema has given us plenty of bad monarchs. So here it is: our Bottom Five Kings — a crown collection of the incompetent, the neglectful, and the royally terrible.
5. Lord Farquaad (Shrek, 2001)
Okay, he’s not technically a king — he’s trying to marry Fiona to get the crown — but tell that to Duloc’s residents living under his plastic tyranny. Voiced with Shakespearean gusto by John Lithgow, Farquaad embodies every petty dictator cliché, right down to his Napoleonic stature. He banishes fairy-tale creatures, hosts a death tournament to outsource his hero work, and runs a kingdom that looks like it was built out of Lego bricks at a Disney garage sale. Shrek, directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, became DreamWorks’ billion-dollar middle finger to Disney, but Farquaad himself remains a brilliantly awful monarch-in-waiting. He’s mean, vain, and cowardly — the sort of ruler who’d outlaw laughter if he couldn’t be the punchline.
4. King Agamemnon (Time Bandits, 1981)
Played by Sean Connery, Agamemnon is first presented as a kind of salvation in Terry Gilliam’s surreal kid’s adventure. He kills the Minotaur, saves young Kevin, and even adopts him, offering the boy a new life as a prince. But then the Time Bandits reappear, and Connery’s Agamemnon just… lets them snatch Kevin away without lifting a finger. Later, Connery shows up again — this time in a modern-day cameo as a fireman — and still leaves Kevin abandoned in the rubble after his parents literally explode. Connery took the role because his friend Michael Palin cheekily wrote in the script that Agamemnon should be played by “someone like Sean Connery,” never expecting they’d land him. But the result is a monarch who teaches Kevin (and us) that sometimes kings are just friendly faces who disappear the moment you need them most.
3. King Arthur (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975)
On paper, Arthur is the Once and Future King. On screen — specifically the one directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones — he’s a coconut-clapping buffoon played by Graham Chapman. This Arthur spends his “reign” bickering with anarcho-syndicalist peasants about divine right, losing knights to killer rabbits, and treating his holy quest like a bad pub crawl. And unlike the mythic Arthur, this one doesn’t go down in battle; he gets arrested by modern-day cops. The film cost just under $400,000 to make and became a cult classic, but its Arthur is the definition of royal impotence — the sort of king who couldn’t rally a cub scout troop, let alone unite England.
2. King Claudius (Hamlet, 1990)
I almost went with Scar from The Lion King here — Jeremy Irons’ velvet-voiced feline tyrant who murders his brother, Mufasa, voiced by the late, great James Earl Jones, and then steals the throne. But then I remembered: Scar is just Claudius with fur and a soundtrack. In Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 version of Hamlet, Claudius is played by veteran actor Alan Bates as an Oliver Reed proxy, and he’s every bit the usurping monarch Shakespeare intended: kills his brother with poison to the ear, marries his sister-in-law, and then spends the rest of the film trying to squash Hamlet’s revenge. Bates leans into oily charm, but he’s a king consumed by guilt, paranoia, and Hamlet’s endless monologues. By the end, his reign is so rotten it topples the entire royal family in a pile of corpses. He’s the OG Scar, minus the Elton John banger.
1. King Uther Pendragon (Excalibur, 1981)
Played by a young Gabriel Byrne in John Boorman’s glitter-soaked, mud-splattered retelling of Arthurian legend, Uther manages to screw up peace in Britain in record time. The ink is barely dry on a truce between kingdoms before he spots Igrayne, wife of Duke Gorlois, and decides lust is worth more than lasting stability. With Merlin’s help, Uther disguises himself as Gorlois to bed her, kicking off war, betrayal, and the conception of Arthur in a night of catastrophic “diplomacy.” The fallout is immediate: the peace collapses, Gorlois dies, and Uther ends up mortally wounded, leaving Excalibur jammed in a stone as a posthumous middle finger to the land. His recklessness didn’t just wreck his reign — it cursed the next generation with Morgana’s vengeance and Arthur’s doomed legacy. As far as bad kings go, Byrne’s Uther shows exactly how not to run a kingdom.