In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission (2014) – Review

In this last installment of the In the Name of the King trilogy Uwe “Why do people keep giving me money?” Boll returns to make another nonsensical piece of cinematic trash. Once again we have a film that has nothing to do with its predecessor; no actors, locations or even characters from the two previous films make an appearance. The only difference here is that star Dominic Purcell seems to be putting an effort into his performance, something Dolph failed to do in In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, and being shot in Bulgaria they had access to some nice locations.

The movie opens with badass gun-for-hire Haven Kaine (Dominic Purcell) stalking the halls of a hotel, coldly murdering the security staff, and then he executes his primary target, who he finds hiding in the shower of his room. How cool and badass is Haven? Well after killing a half-dozen people he stops to drink a cup of coffee, and why not? It’s not as if you are in a hotel where a maid or a guest could across all the bodies strewn through the various hallways and raise an alarm. Maybe ruthless assassinations are just that commonplace in Bulgaria. Regardless this allows Haven to calmly leave and meet up with Ayavlo (Marian Valev), the man who hired him, to get paid. Despite being told “This was my last job” Ayavlo offers Haven two million dollars to kidnap two little girls belonging to the European royal family, and instead of saying, “I was quit before and you can consider me twice as quit now” he actually takes the job.

This is certainly a strange introduction to a film’s hero.

He locks the two girls in a cargo container, but not before stealing an amulet one of them was wearing. The girl claims it is magical but Haven is more interested in the fact that it resembles a tattoo on his arm, and when he places the amulet next to the tattoo a portal through time opens. Damn, if I had a dollar for every time that happened to me. Haven is sucked through and finds himself back in medieval times, and like the previous movie this version of medieval times has dragons.

Don’t show fear, dragons can totally smell it on you.

Haven flees to a local village where he joins the panicked people inside. He finally remembers he has a gun and unloads the clip at the fire-breathing beast, but it has no effect. Two sisters Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva), and Emeline (Daria Simeonova) notice this stranger and the loud device he wields and they bring him into their home for safety. Why they are impressed with his gun is beyond me. It went “Bang-bang” but did nothing to the attacking dragon; so we are to assume people here are very impressed with loud noises. They take him to see a shaman who of course tells him that the tattoo signifies that he is the “chosen one” to lead the people against the evil king. Who or why this is the case is never explained; he tells them the tattoo was just a design his late wife liked when there visited Venice Beach, but somehow it’s all “Destiny, foretold, bullshit, bullshit.” He at first wants no part of this “Destiny” racket but then decides to join them for some reason.

Hmmm, what could that reason be?

Arabella tells Haven that she and her sister are princesses and that their uncle Tervon murdered their mother and later killed their father and battle, all this because Arabella refused to marry him. So we have a dude who turns to fratricide/regicide just because his niece spurned him? Well that certainly qualifies him for chief villain status, and he even murders his own soldiers if they deliver bad news to solidify his position as evil, but what all this exposition does is make me feel that the film should have started with a narrator stating, “We now bring you In the Name of the King 3 already in progress.” Characters keep coming and going and just randomly spouting stuff that has no bearing on the plot…well as much of a plot as this film has. Arabella at first doesn’t like Haven but after seeing him being all heroic in battle she lowers her defenses and they start to develop a relationship. This is better than the “Will they won’t they?” relationship Dolph had in the previous film which went from hate to sex in about twenty seconds, but it still goes nowhere. Also just how is Haven such a great fighter with medieval weapons?

A sword or a Glock, what’s the difference?

It’s one thing for an assassin to be proficient in multiple forms of combat but I doubt there is much call for sword fighting these days. What is also never explained is why the same actor who plays the evil King Tervon is also the guy who played Ayavlo, the man who hired Hazen to kidnap the little princesses. Are those two little girls supposed to be descendant of Princess Arabella and Princess Emeline, and Ayavolo is the descendant of Tervon, and somehow history is repeating itself? Which would mean Ayavolo wants to marry one of those girls, right?

King or gangster this guy is all kinds of creepy.

The script never makes a lick of sense; we learn that Tervon controls the dragon but not how this is possible.  Is it connected to the amulet he wears which is a duplicate of the one that brought Hazen through time? At one point Hazen and Tervon duel and when Hazen best him easily (And again how is this possible, did we miss a training montage or something?) Tervon calls the dragon to drive the heroes away. And then almost immediately after being routed Hazen and Arabella turn around and chase after Terzon. Do these two idiots have a short-term memory problem or something? Terzon has a fucking dragon and they are going to storm his castle, alone. Brilliant plan.

Good thing Terzon didn’t lock the castle door.

So Hazen duels Terzon again, and once again he easily defeats him, but the dragon is late this time so Hazen is able to run the douchebag through. For some reason Terzon’s death causes the time portal to open and despite her love for Hazen she urges him to go through to rescue the two girls who he had left locked in a metal cargo container. Unfortunately just as he goes through the dragon finally shows up and it swoops through the portal so that it can be in the final act. The beasts chases Hazen through the streets of Sofia, Bulgaria, and despite having tried to kill him numerous times, it attacks and carries away one of Ayavlo thugs who was about to shoot Hazen. So our “hero” is able to kill the villain…again, and return the girls to their father.

Oh, and there is still a dragon loose in modern Bulgaria.

In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission is about as bad as one could expect. It certainly had a nice attempt at making a ruthless assassin become the hero, but the script never really got around to justifying his change of heart. Dominic Purcell is the only Hollywood actor in this film, all the other parts are filled by locals, and he does a decent enough job, but not enough to justify watching this thing. There is a fairly fun running gag about his inability to ride a horse, but that just highlights his strange ability to use a broadsword. That this time out the production had access to actual castles as locations certainly helped, and the CGI dragon was as good you’d expect from a straight-to-dvd production to look, but overall the movie cannot escape the smell of an Uwe Boll production. Let’s just hope the “Last Mission” subtitle stands and we see no more In the Name of the King movies.