Knights of Mehdom (AKA Knights of Badassdom)

Last week I saw Knights of Badassdom.  I was excited to see it – I’d heard of it a few years before it was finally released, and as a lifelong larper though it looked entertaining.  I mean, Peter Dinklage as a larper?  Awesome.  That guy from True Blood?  He seems pretty funny.  Summer Glau?  Really?  Who else is in this movie?  Danny Pudi and Joshua Malina?  What the hell, this is the best cast ever.  This movie is going to be great!

*crickets*  I’ve been trying to write this review all week.  There is literally nothing to say about this fucking movie.  It’s mildly amusing, with some good chuckles.  It’s actually frustrating how neutral it is.  It’s not even BAD.  If it was terrible, I could sink my teeth into it, find something to say.  But nope, nothing.  It just kind of is.  That in itself is kind of interesting I guess.  They somehow managed to create a perfectly Ph balanced movie, guaranteed not to raise a pulse or elicit an emotion.

I can’t even get angry at the way they treat nerds in the movie.  It’s a little annoying that the main characters aren’t really nerds, they’re just friends with them.  But they don’t act like dicks to the people around them, and generally treat the larp like an actual thing that makes sense for people to do.  The best part about the movie actually was that a character with dwarfism and a character in a wheelchair were treated like regular people who happened to have those conditions, which is fucking amazing given the treatment anyone with some kind of physical condition is usually given on the screen.  The worst part about the movie was that it was kind of unexpectedly gorey in an Evil Dead 2 kind of way.  Just not as funny as Evil Dead 2.

I wish that I could give you a bit more entertainment this week by ranting about how fucking awful Knights of Badassdom ended up being, or raving about how incredible it turned out.  But, I can’t.  The movie is a fucking miracle of neutrality.  It is the perfect Zen film, which has released all of its worldly concerns and transcended, staying behind only as a bodhisattva to guide us toward Nirvana.  I think the creators of the movie has somehow forged a new universal constant, out of context with the rest of the space-time continuum.  It has no traits, it simply is.