Twenty-three years ago, there was a Dungeons & Dragons movie that wasn’t intended as a comedy but was so bad it was absolutely hilarious. I didn’t review it. I don’t even remember much about it except the experience: I have vivid memories of sitting in that multiplex guffawing nonstop — nonstop, I tell you — with my geek gang. We still talk about it to this day, with awe. It was a genuine bonding experience, like going to war together.
Now we have another attempt at adapting for the big screen *checks notes* a nebulous set of loosey-goosey rules for a participatory storytelling game played with pencil and paper and dice. If that sounds like I’m putting down Dungeons & Dragons the game: no way. I’ve played it. I’ve been a DM. I love it. But slapping the D&D brand on a high-fantasy action-adventure movie can never be anything but the most crass exercise in monetizing a preexisting intellectual property… and the bar on that is, well, in the lowest levels of the dungeon, given the state of Hollywood these days. It makes even less sense than videogame adaptations, which almost always feel like you’re looking over the shoulder of someone else playing the game. But at least the game-movie you’re just an onlooker to is probably somewhat recognizable and familiar. Dungeons & Dragons: Honour* Among Thieves is like sitting off to the side watching your friends play a D&D campaign that isn’t particularly inventive or imaginative and that you have no previous investment in or appreciation for.
So a D&D movie can be pretty much anything or anything, as long as it’s high fantasy. Directors and writers (with Michael Gilio) John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein went with high-fantasy comedy, and landed somewhere in between their previous two movies, the outrageously brilliant Game Night and the embarrassingly awful Vacation reboot. But the way the comedy plays out here? A lot of tedious slapstick and obvious punchlines you scry the instant a wannabe medieval wag opens their mouth. It makes me think of Brad Pitt’s Rusty in Ocean’s Eleven giving Matt Damon’s Linus tips for passing as something you’re not when you’re trying to con an unsuspecting rube. The key piece of advice: “Be funny, but don’t make ’em laugh.”
Ladies and germs, I give you: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor** Among Thieves. Which thinks it’s funny but didn’t make me laugh. Not even once.
Otherwise, sure: there’s an adventuring band here that ticks all the D&D boxes. There’s a thief/bard in Chris Pine’s (Wonder Woman 1984, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) Edgin (though he doesn’t bard much; I feel like a fuckton more humor could have been mined from that aspect of his character). There’s his bestie buddy in Michelle Rodriguez’s (She Dies Tomorrow, Alita: Battle Angel) badass warrior Holga. There’s a low-level mage (Justice Smith: Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) and a vaguely defined shape-shifter (Sophia Lillis: It: Chapter Two) and a paladin (and, like, why would you cast Bridgerton hottie Regé-Jean Page and have him in the movie this little?). They’re all on quest to find a magical whatzit macguffin to revive Edgin’s dead wife. (Fuck, seriously? The dead-wife trope again? Thanks, I hate it. In a genre that is allegedly all about flights of imagination, how the fuck are men so unimaginative?) The stuff of comedy, amirite? *huge sigh*
There’s a lot of running around killing fantastical evil creatures. There’s a generic bad human character (Hugh Grant [The Gentlemen, Paddington 2], fully embracing the no-fucks-left-to-give segment of his career, which I applaud, and I hope he was wildly overpaid for this). It’s all borderline incoherent, with ambitions — failed ones — to be as sentimental as it is amusing, sketched in cheap-looking CGI. Then go pull a plot contrivance out of your bag of holding, why not?
I, profoundly proud to be an enormous dork, was utterly unimpressed. Not least because this is a movie that kinda seems to be embarrassed by its own nerdery.
Imma go watch The Princess Bride again…
* I saw this film in the UK, invited to a London press screening by British publicists, so I feel obligated to utilize the British spelling of this word.
** But for SEO’s sake, I also feel compelled to get the American spelling in here once, too.
more films like this:
• Army of Darkness [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• Onward [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Disney+]
I’m surprised you didn’t like it more. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and both the humor and sentimentality landed well for me. I appreciated all the little nods to the actual gaming experience, like the stupid plans the characters come up with before (sometimes) settling on a better one, or the paladin the more chaotic-neutral type characters dislike (who’s also clearly the DM’s favorite NPC.) I saw the exact opposite of “embarrassed by its own nerdery.” It felt to me like it was made by people who have actually played D&D.
On the dead-wife trope, for me the way it was resolved alleviated many of the problems with using the trope in the first place, but I wouldn’t have minded if they’d gone in a different direction. (The couple’s initial “two scoundrels bringing their pre-teen kid with them on adventures” setup looked like fun, and not something I can recall seeing recently.)
Out of curiosity, as I know we’re the same age, when were your D&D-playing years? For me it was around age 10-12, after which I got into different RPGs, then I came back much later (about 8 years ago), albeit playing an “old” version of D&D (3.5).
Interesting that you saw your examples as nods to the gaming experience. To me they just rang of lazy writing.
Hmm. It all still revolves around the feels of the male protagonist, though. The agency of the choice he makes is ALL on him — it’s all about HIS journey. The two female characters involved have no say in it. As always when it comes to matters like this one, in a more ecumenical pop-culture storytelling environment, what transpires here might be fine. But our pop culture storytelling relentlessly prioritizes men and their journeys. I’m sick of it.
Junior high, so around age 13-14. I’m still pissed off that the little geek group in my class wouldn’t let me play with them, because they were all guys and I was a girl. That might have been the beginning of feminist awakening. But I found other people to play with.
I haven’t played in years, and would love to give it a try again.
I’ve never understood that sort of gatekeeping. My friends and I would have been overjoyed if a girl was interested in what we were doing and wanted to hang out and game with us.
And more recently with tales of “fake geek girls” – the alleged strumpets who only pretend to like geeky stuff (for some unfathomable but no doubt sinister purpose.) Again, if girls wanted to hang out with me doing stuff I enjoyed, I wouldn’t have cared one bit whether they were “fake” or “real” geeks. I would be all “Welcome, how may I assist you in your charade?”
Well, I haven’t seen the movie myself, yet, but can confirm that both one of my old AD&D pals and the reviewer of our local (German) newspaper, who seems to have played AD&D when younger, felt similarly, and – to their respective surprise – quite liked it.
As I’ve heard/read that reference twice before and now a third time, independently from each other, I thought I might just mention it.
Will return and comment again once I have seen the movie myself.
Right now I can both imagine this to be fun as well as see where and how this approach might not work out particularly well.
Honestly, that’s great. I’m glad lots of people are enjoying this movie more than I did.
i cannot believe there is a D&D movie worse than that first one we saw…. boring is the crime, of course. at least that one we saw (2001?) was so outrageously hilarious that i still recall certain moments… i rolled my eyes (not my dice) at the commercials for this one… sad. i really like most of the cast.
There isn’t. The movie from 2000 is absolutely unwatchable. MaryAnn may not have been impressed by this one, but it is no where near the absolute dreck of that earlier movie.
She seems to be in the minority on this one. The film clearly didn’t work for her, and it’s obviously not going to connect with everyone. That doesn’t put it in the same league as the first one, though.
LOL, I definitely am! I’m frankly baffled by all the rave reviews.
As John says, this new movie is nowhere near as terrible as the 2000 flick. I wouldn’t even say that this one is terrible (hence the yellow light). It just mostly lazy and obvious and familiar, which is extra unforgivable when there is so much scope for imagination and creativity here, and it’s mostly ignored.