Not being a fan of role playing games, I don’t really know what fans of those games would expect from a Dungeons & Dragons movie. I know neither fans of the game, nor of movies in general, had been thrilled with the releases under that brand leading up 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Overwhelmingly positive reviews of this latest film left me curious, and I’m glad I took the plunge.
I think it is a given there will be dragons, and there are at least three of them by my count. Something I have not seen before is a seriously obese dragon, though I doubt they’ll be changing the name of the series to Dungeons & Fat Dragons.
However, I wonder if fans of the game would lose their shit if there weren’t any dungeons. Those seemed to be underrepresented here, unless you count the panopticon at the beginning of the picture, which is where a new cellmate is introduced to prisoners Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez. This reptilian thing errs in a huge way when it makes threatening sexual advances towards the latter, who kicks his kneecaps so hard that they bend backwards and he collapses. Pine’s casual knitting is not interrupted.
I started to say that scene takes place on an ice planet, already forgetting this is fantasy and not science fiction, and so everywhere we go will be restricted to one world. Let’s face it, those lines are pretty much blurred to nonexistence nowadays, and it seems like every picture of this kind has interchangeable parts from Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. A climatic battle royale near the end tosses in a bit of The Hunger Games, as well as (to my considerable surprise) Cube.
There’s the inevitable smartass anti-hero, for which I blame Guardians of the Galaxy, even if that trend goes back to Han Solo. Fortunately, Pine excels in such a role, as a troubadour who largely leaves the fighting to Rodriguez. Smart decision, as she is fully believable in such scenes. I especially liked a moment wherein she takes out two soldiers with a bow in a manner I have not seen before, and it does not involve an arrow.
All Pine is trying to do is get back something he himself stole two years prior, an enchanted doohickey with which he can bring his wife back from the dead. He only briefly had that item before leaving it to fellow thief Hugh Grant for safekeeping, on the condition the other man will watch after Pine’s daughter (Chloe Coleman). That heist had been arranged by Grant and a mysterious sorceress played by Daisy Head. It is no surprise those two had planned for their fellow thieves to be caught while this dastardly duo absconds with the magical McGuffin.
Unfortunately, our heroes only realize this after dropping in on Grant and Head in the kingdom of Neverwinter, of which the former is now emperor, or something like that. Funny, but I don’t actually recall him having an exact title. He gleefully twists in the knife with such lines as his response to Pine accusing him of turning Coleman against him: “I didn’t spend years turning her against you. Really, we hardly talked about you at all.” It probably didn’t help that, despite them being handmade, the mittens Pine brought as a gift for Coleman weren’t probably all that welcome in a place called Neverwinter.
Our heroes manage to evade imminent death at the hands of Grant’s henchmen, only to still end up without the reincarnation gizmo or Coleman. Plotting revenge, they gather together the obligatory group of ragtag ne’er-do-wells on a quest to get a necessary object, which is only needed to fight a big bad at the climax.
Among their group is Justice Smith, a wizard reduced to telekinetically pickpocketing an audience while doing a lame magic show. Then there’s Sophia Lillis as some half-human spell-casting something, who looks human except for her horns, pointy ears and a tail that I swear kept disappearing in some shots. Tangential to the group is a wise and noble holy man of sorts played by Regé-Jean Page. He will help them fulfill their quest to get a necessary object that is nothing more than a stepping stone in the quest. In this case, it is a helmet, but it might as well be the golden fleece or a golden apple. I suspect all that ever matters in this kind of tale, classic or modern, is that the object be made of gold.
There were many clever setups throughout the rather long runtime, and many of these have solid gags as part of them. A bit where magic can make the reanimated dead answer five questions initially plays out exactly how one would expect it to, though there is pleasure in seeing the joke done well. The scene then goes in some directions I had not foreseen. Another bit has a bridge which can only be crossed in an excessively convoluted manner, as explained by Page, until those rules are abruptly rendered moot as the bridge is destroyed.
How they will get past this now-collapsed bridge is with a staff which can create portals from one point to any other within eyesight. This makes for a couple of good action scenes. A similar device was employed in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but I it is used more enjoyably here. One of these moments is when it is cleverly used in preparation for a heist, but I had the feeling what we are shown would not stand up to intense scrutiny.
The CGI also does not stand up to scrutiny on occasion. Early in the runtime, some amazing visuals are simply occurring in the background, as if this is just everyday stuff in the world of the movie. Then it starts making the usual mistake of having virtual cameras do complex flythroughs of these digital realms, which complete breaks the illusion.
CGI used for creatures is also a mixed bag. There is an interesting bit where Page rescues an anthropomorphic kitten from the mouth of a giant, beached fish. While both creatures are fully CGI, I couldn’t help but notice their movements were a bit stiff, and I wondered if that was intentionally done to make them more like puppets, which then recalls the Henson work on such beloved 80’s films as Labyrinth. Perhaps the worst use of computer imagery is the “owl bear” which Lillis can shape-shift into, and which looks deeply stupid. That said, I will concede it has a great moment in the big boss battle at the end.
About Lillis’s ability: I was frustrated by the rules (if any) which govern her shape-shifting. In one scene, she starts as a fly, and then turns into a mouse, then briefly back into herself, then briefly back into a mouse, before becoming a bird, an ostrich-like thing and a deer–all while Head is in hot pursuit. I found myself confused why Lillis didn’t just remain a fly through all of this, since I imagine that would be something very difficult to pursue. It definitely would have made a much smaller target for the volleys of arrows soldiers start firing at her.
Of course, nobody is coming into Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves expecting faultless logic. They want some impressive action set-pieces and some decent quips. While Pine gets the lion’s share of the latter, some of the best moments are where Page is the straight man to these, as this is a deeply humorless man who doesn’t understand colloquialisms or sarcasm. One of my favorite lines of Pine’s is in response to Page saying something which only superficially scans as something profound: “Just because that sentence is symmetrical doesn’t mean it’s not nonsense.” To take that one step further, just because this movie is nonsense doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable.
Dir: John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
Starring: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant
Watched on 4K blu-ray