Hate the Player, Love the Game

Dungeon and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) crystallizes just about everything about moviemaking in our time. We’ve got a well-worn piece of intellectual property that’s already got a (failed) cinematic trilogy under its belt. The IP itself once represented all things grim and unsightly (I, for example, recall a woman at a block party telling me that her young adult boyfriend had been driven to suicide by the game’s demonic magic). Now, like nearly all “nerd culture” it’s been commodified in ways Olivia Munn herself could barely have imagined. Fantasy lands lend themselves to CGI. It’s even got Chris Pine for God’s sake. I can feel my blood boiling just thinking about it.

And yet, may the Lord be merciful to me, I liked it. I laughed. I smiled. I cried (okay, maybe not that one). Perhaps it was the brief scene before the film began in which the cast called my wife and me superheroes for actually seeing a movie in theaters. It could’ve been because we saw it on a Wednesday night at a discounted price in a room devoid of another soul (even the projector was automated). Maybe I’m just getting soft as I approach thirty.

But eh, my circumstances and I can’t take all the credit. Directors and co-writers (along with Michael Gillio) Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley deserve some too. Intentionally or not, they’ve done one thing that allows the whole shebang to hang together: made a bard, Edgin (Chris Pine), the main character. Bards are annoying; this is canon, as they say. They make quips and smile stupid smirks. They play lutes and celebrate their own uselessness. This undisputed fact provides the perfect grounding for what would otherwise be the inane, undercutting humor of so many contemporary movies. Edgin quips because that’s what bards do. It is organic to the character—annoying, but in an endearing, rather than theme-altering, way.

He is helped in this endeavor by a band of misfits: Holga the barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), Simon the half-elf sorcerer (Justice Smith), and Doric the tiefling druid (Sophia Lillis). What emerges here is an honest-to-goodness party that sets out on a series of quests, each geared toward an overarching quest (the liberation of Elgin’s daughter from a former friend and conman turned lord).

That’s the secret to the movie: it plays like an actual Dungeons and Dragons campaign. There are occasional jokes peppering an action-packed adventure (that even include a few small scares). As a friend (who convinced me to go see the film) put it: the whole project makes a lot more sense when you think of each character as a manifestation of how a stunningly average real-life player would choose to do so. The barbarian grunts and grumbles in an almost self-parodying way. The bard does the cutesy quipping and motivates the party in ways bordering on the grotesque. The druid scowls at humanity and makes (according to my wife anyway) foolish decisions about what to transform into and when.

But why see it then? If it’s no more than a just-about-par DnD campaign swathed in CGI, what’s the point? Because sometimes a competently made adventure is what you need. The DMs behind this one know what they’re doing. They fake us out, twist and turn without veering beyond the predictability we crave (if we’ve chosen to see this one at all). It’s the kind of movie actually made to be seen in a theater, a piece of true entertainment that offers more than merchandise tie-ins and GIFs for Twitter (though it may bring those too).

Will they make it a franchise? I wouldn’t mind. I don’t have time for full board-game campaigns these days. So—whether laughing at or with them—at least I got to watch a couple competent DMs lead a few nerds around by the ears.