Knights of Badassdom Review

Warning there be spoilers here! I have been looking forward to Knights of Badassdom ever since I saw the trailer. A Live Action Role-Playing comedy with a great cast? Sign me up. (The cast includes Peter Dinklage, Steve Zahn, Summer Glau and Ryan Kwanten and they are all FANTASTIC). The story is about three friends who go on a LARP adventure but inadvertently cause horror and mayhem when one of them summons a succubus using a magic tome. You could get all of that from the trailer, by the way.

This movie had all of the hallmarks to be great cheesy fun. People dressing up and pretending to battle and adventure in a fantasy setting. Not taking itself too seriously and the actors obviously having fun playing their parts. Tons of opportunity for self-depricating humor. It is all there for the taking. Where it breaks down is in the last two-thirds of the movie when it becomes more about gore killings than about LARP and friends growing and saving the day.

Knights of Badassdom could have been a great movie. They could have gone with this and it would have been 5 stars:

1. LARP players get ambushed by paint-ballers and when running away slice the paint-ballers tires.
2. Guy gets dumped by girlfriend for being a loser so he gets dragged off by buddies to a LARP weekend.
3. LARP hilarity ensues with people doing outrageous things in costume running about (some stoned) and over-acting.
4. Paint-ballers find out about LARP weekend and show up for revenge.
5. Buddies save the day by running off the paint-ballers using their LARP weapons.
6. Guy gets new girl and they all agree to do it all again in a month.

That would have been an awesome movie. The cast for Knights of Badassdom is great and do a good job with what they are given - it is the plot that let them down. I mean look at how cool Peter Dinklage looks as Sir Hung:

Here is the full party:

Most of the 6 points I mentioned above are in the movie already. What derails it from being a tongue-in-cheek nerd-fest awesome comedy is the succubus story line. Every time we see the three main guys or the rest of their party LARP-ing, it is great. There is witty dialogue, there is camp, there is humor. When we start the gore-fest killing, it is just annoying and loses the point. Seriously, a movie that has this limbering up scene:

and this awesome van art:

should go with being a LARP comedy and leave out the gore/horror angle.

Anyway you look at it, you get exactly what is in the trailer for Knights of Badassdom. Unfortunately, spread out to nearly 90 minutes it just doesn't hold up as a good movie. If they re-cut the film with the plan I have listed above then this would have been 4 maybe 5 Mick Happies. As it is, it is a 4 - 5 Mick Happy cast in a 2 Mick Happy movie. So, Sir Hung, put us out of our misery and as Summer Glau's Gwen says, "Finish Him!":