In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, the $70 million fantasy epic, bombed magnificently at the box office, drawing only $3 million in its first weekend, and the circling vultures know that infamous director Uwe Boll is running out of extra lives.
This isn’t the first time Boll’s big budget future has been questioned, but news reports now seem certain that he won’t be making more mega-million movies. His recent comments to the Hollywood Reporter suggest he’s thinking the same thing.
This could signal the end of Boll as a byword for bad films. Two of the most frequently disastrous (and hilarious) aspects of Boll films are symptomatic of their budgets: special effects and casting. The former includes “clever” POV shots, unbelievably derivative bullet-time editing, and similarly exhausted post-Matrix techniques. The latter stuffs his films with slumping B-list actors who sometimes don’t even seem to conceal their disdain for the material. With these two cash-bloated albatrosses lifted from his neck, Boll will just be left with his lethally banal scripts and static direction. That would still mean bad movies, but not Uwe Boll-bad. He would still have a lot of obstacles to conquer, but he would be well on his way to making a bearable film.
The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola 