Dungeon and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves <\/em>(2023) crystallizes just about everything about moviemaking in our time. We\u2019ve got a well-worn piece of intellectual property that\u2019s 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\u2019s demonic magic). Now, like nearly all \u201cnerd culture\u201d it\u2019s been commodified in ways Olivia Munn herself could barely have imagined. Fantasy lands lend themselves to CGI. It\u2019s even got Chris Pine for God\u2019s sake. I can feel my blood boiling just thinking about it.<\/p>\nAnd 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\u2019ve 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\u2019m just getting soft as I approach thirty.<\/p>\n
But eh, my circumstances and I can\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s what bards do. It is organic to the character\u2014annoying, but in an endearing, rather than theme-altering, way.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s daughter from a former friend and conman turned lord).<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But why see it then? If it\u2019s no more than a just-about-par DnD campaign swathed in CGI, what\u2019s the point? Because sometimes a competently made adventure is what you need. The DMs behind this one know what they\u2019re doing. They fake us out, twist and turn without veering beyond the predictability we crave (if we\u2019ve chosen to see this one at all). It\u2019s the kind of movie actually made to be seen in a theater, a piece of true entertainment <\/em>that offers more than merchandise tie-ins and GIFs for Twitter (though it may bring those too).<\/p>\nWill they make it a franchise? I wouldn\u2019t mind. I don\u2019t have time for full board-game campaigns these days. So\u2014whether laughing at or with them\u2014at least I got to watch a couple competent DMs lead a few nerds around by the ears.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dungeon and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) crystallizes just about everything about moviemaking in our time. We\u2019ve got a well-worn piece of intellectual property that\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2640,"featured_media":2733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1731],"tags":[3708,3705,3612,3723,3696,3684,367,1740,3687,3714,3699,152,3693,3717,3648,939,3702,3690,3711,3726,3720],"class_list":["post-2730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-adventure-film","tag-adventure-movie","tag-barbarian","tag-bard","tag-board-game","tag-chris-pine","tag-cinema","tag-comedy","tag-dungeons-and-dragons","tag-elf","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-geek","tag-half-elf","tag-horror-movie","tag-movie","tag-movie-theater","tag-nerd","tag-quest","tag-sorcerer","tag-tiefling"],"yoast_head":"\n
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