It Goes On Way Too Long

There’s really no kind way to say this: Uwe Boll is a terrible filmmaker. He’s certainly productive, and he made a ton of movies in the late 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s, but, by all accounts, none of his films were very good. Most of them were outright bad, verging on nigh unwatchable. He made video game adaptation after video game adaptation, and at a certain point most critics said, “well, it’s an Uwe Boll film so you know what to expect: not much.” His films were renowned for how bad they were, to the point where anyone going in to see his films did so to see how bad they were going to be. Hate watching a film might give it eyes, but it’s not the same as watching one because you actually want to.

With so many of his films being disasters, and no one much liking anything he was doing, why was it that he ended up making so many? At his peak, in 2011, 2013, and 2014 he was making four films a year, and in the years around that he still managed to crank out two to three movies, at least as a producer and often as a director as well. How did he get this streak and why didn’t anyone stop him? Well, eventually they did, but the reason for that wasn’t specifically because his films were bad. It actually didn’t matter if his films were good or bad because Boll was exploiting a loophole in the German film production system.

As it worked out, films made in Germany could be taken as a tax write off for the full production budget. The German government was, essentially, funding every one of Boll’s films, fully and completely, because he based his business in Germany. Every one could be a complete disaster, but any money they made during their theatrical, home video, and licensing runs was still pure profit for Boll’s studio because, by the end of the year, it was all paid for by Germany. He stuck them with the bill and got to keep all the profits. It was quite the game for him.

Eventually Germany wised up and changed the rules and that was when Bolls output drastically fell off. But that wasn’t before he made a ton of cinematic disasters, including this absolute turd of a film, the third Dungeon Siege movie from Boll’s studio, In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission. Didn’t realize there were two previous films in this series – both In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds) – or that there’d even been adaptations of this game series at all? Fear not, I’ve watched all three of these wretched films so you don’t have to. And if you’ve made it this far that you’re now three films deep along with me, well, I do feel bad you have to suffer like this.

This third Dungeon Siege film focuses on Hazen Kaine (Dominic Purcell), an assassin running hits for all-around bad dude Ayavlo (Marian Valev). After his most recent job for the mob boss, Hazen tells Ayavlo that he’s out. He’s done. Ayavlo, though, offers him one more deal to finish their contract: $2 Mil to kidnap the two daughters of a European royal family. Kaine accepts, figuring the nest egg would be nice to have once he’s done, so he drives off, captures the girls, and locks them in a cargo container so Ayavlo and his men can pick them up later.

One of the two girls, though, has a pendant with strange symbols on it. Those symbols match a random tattoo Kaine has on his arm, and once he picks up the pendant and goes outside, a weird portal opens up, sucking him back through time to the Middle Ages. There he gets chased by a dragon, and then ends up meeting two women: Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva) and Emeline (Daria Simeonova), daughters of the former king of the land. That king was murdered by Tervin (also played by Valev), and the murderer took over the throne. Now with a magical pendant he has, which matches the one Hazen saw earlier, the evil king is able to control a dragon and use it to threaten the land. To get home Hazen has to team up with the women, fight the evil Tervin, and find the hero within himself in this tale of fantasy and… well, not really action. Something like action, but on a much smaller budget.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission is as slap-dash and amateurish of a production as you’re ever likely to see from Uwe Boll. Produced on a budget of $3.5 Mil, there’s nothing about this film that looks good, especially not for 2014 when this film was released. Every set feels like it’s made out of cardboard and sadness, every costume looks like it came off a renn faire rack. Every prop looks like it was bought from a toy store and then thrown on a table for the extras to use. This is as low budget as a fantasy film can get, and it’s hard to really call it anything but bad.

Technically it is a fantasy movie, insofar as there’s magic, monsters, and time-traveling portals in the story. Of course, the fact is that what little we have in the way of special effects is done with the cheapest, simplest, stock footage CGI that Boll could find. From the dragon, to the portal, and everything magical in between, the CGI here looks somehow worse than anything you might have seen in the last four decades. Even Tron looks better, and that was one of the first films to try and make anything using wireframe models. This film’s CGI looks so bad you want to laugh at it but can’t just because it’s so sad.

The same goes for the sets. It wouldn’t surprise me if the crew rented one old castle for a day, built one cheap town set, threw some props in one cave, and then filmed all of the sequences set in the past around there, or in the woods, to make up all of the settings we see. There are barely any locations, and no real sense of travel, for a film that is supposed to be an epic fantasy adventure. Obviously Boll didn’t pay for the epic part of that equation either, preferring to spend his money not on anything seen on screen. Nothing looks even halfway decent. It’s ally tragic and thrown together.

Not even the acting is decent. Dominic Purcell is the best actor in this film, and while he’s usually genuinely good (he was one of the best players in Legends of Tomorrow, see the ArrowverseWhen it was announced that the CW was creating a show based on the Green Arrow, people laughed. The CW? Really? Was it going to be teen-oriented like everything else on the network and be called "Arrow High"? And yet that one show, Arrow has spawned three spin-offs, various related shows and given DC a successful shared universe, the Arrowverse on TV and streaming.), he can’t muster any of that talent here. He seems genuinely bored every time he’s on film, which he likely was. I have no doubt this was a paycheck film for him. Maybe he signed up, expecting a meaty role based on the script, only to learn later that it was a Uwe Boll production and whatever was on the page wouldn’t be films as expected. Whatever the case, he doesn’t care about this film, and neither should we. And he’s still the best actor giving the best performance in this whole film.

We can’t even rely on the action in this film to help us get through it. If Uwe Boll has a style it’s “shake the camera and edit the footage as much as possible to cover up barely filming anything.” The action in the film is barely choreographed and terribly performed. But don’t worry, you won’t be able to see it anyway because none of it was filmed well. Everything is obscured, cut away from, shaken, stirred, chopped up, and then remixed again and again until you can barely tell what’s happening, who’s attacking whom, or why you should even care. It’s the least actiony action I’ve seen in a while, meaning it’s yet more footage that you don’t want to watch.

This film is basically unwatchable. I managed to get through it but it took a lot of pausing, a lot of snacks, and quite a bit of wishing I was doing anything else other than watching this film. But I did it because I’d already seen the previous two and I hate leaving anything unfinished. If you have a choice, don’t watch this film. In fact, don’t watch any of these movies, and quite possibly skip anything with Uwe Boll’s name on. This film is awful, the other films in the series were awful, and everything Uwe Boll has ever made will rank among some of the worst shit you’ve ever seen. Go watch anything other than this film and thank everything you can that you were smarter than I was. I watched this movie so you don’t have to.

Now if only we’d be so lucky and Uwe Boll would retire. That really would be the best news I’ve heard in some time, and I will celebrate whenever it finally happens.