I'll make it simple. Unless you're a huge Dolph Lundgren fan, I recommend you skip In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, director Uwe Boll's latest direct-to-DVD release entirely.
When I saw the original a couple of years ago starring Jason Statham, I thought it would have been better if it was about an hour shorter, but enjoyed it despite the bad reviews. It wasn't Shakespeare, but it was fun. So I thought that maybe the second one would be alright as well. It couldn't be worse than the first one, could it? Boy was I wrong.
Even though I've stuck with Dolph through plenty of movies like Showdown in Little Tokyo with Brandon Lee and a version of Marvel Comics' Punisher with Louis Gossett, Jr., In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds managed to be almost comical in some places and painful in others. Even though it's much shorter than the first film, I wanted to turn it off after about twenty minutes.
Let's start at the beginning — which briefly gave me hope for the rest of the movie. Running through the woods is Eliana (Natalia Guslistaya, Bloodrayne: The Third Reich), a warrior woman being pursued by a group of men until she bursts into the open and we see that she's running towards a big city in our own world. Meanwhile Granger (Lundgren), a retired military man, is demonstrating martial arts to a group of young students with the help of some old military buddies. Immediately, you're thrown into his world as a retired soldier, dealing with the memories of his time in the service and the aches and pains of a body abused in action.
As he mourns the loss of those who didn't make it back from military action and gets a bath ready, he's attacked by the same people who were chasing Elianna through the woods. Just as one of the assailants is about to get in a lucky shot, she appears on the scene to save him and push him through a magical portal to her world.
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Article comments
1 - David
Watched this off Redbox last night. While it's not the WORST film I've ever gotten out of Redbo (that distinct honor is still held by some horrible Star Trek knockoff with a cast of six), it's definitely number two.
Not sure which was worse: the fully-clothed sex scene, the nineteenth-century dialogue interspersed with pseudo-Shakespearean idioms and read in unassuming American accents, or the constant stream of plot twists that leads viewers to suspect the film was written during filming. In any case, it's worth a buck just for laughs.