Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

dir: Johnathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

2023

Nerds. They have infected everything, everywhere, all at once.

So open, out and proud, no longer hiding in the shadows. They even get to make movies these days.

Seeing a fantasy movie with the title Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves would have delighted me once upon a time, because I lived and breathed this nonsense as a teenager. But then an actual movie came along called Dungeons & Dragons back in 2000, and it made most of us realise that we were never going to get what we either wanted or needed, just lame generic fantasy-ish stuff with all the signposts and references, and none of the appeal, with terrible acting to boot. I mean, Jeremy Irons, you’re in a class of your own.

Not long after that, though, the Lord of the Rings movies came along, with vast budgets and vast running times, and the masses liked them, and the nerds thought “maybe they aren’t going to turn all of our beloved childhood stuff into absolute shit”. But it wasn’t just nerds – it was normal people too going along to see the flicks that made them a success. If only nerds went along, it barely would have registered, but the cinemas would have smelled pretty awful.

And now. Now everyone thinks they can make Dungeons & Dragons happen again, I suspect only because of the success of Stranger Things, in which the venerable roleplaying game keeps being played and keeps being mentioned. Other than that I can’t figure out what the impetus was to inflict this “property” onto the world again.

I don’t really think it can happen, because everything from D&D now just looks like a generic fantasy setting, and we’ve had plenty of movies and tv / streaming series set in generic fantasy settings. Now of course it’s just easier to lift directly from the LotRs movies when it comes to what cities should look like, or rampaging hordes of creatures that live underground, but we’ve had no shortage of fantasy franchise crap over the years.

I am okay with that. I enjoyed this flick, which surprised me, because my hopes going in were nil, perhaps less than nil. It felt like they got the tone right, in that it’s comedic and light-hearted, but not gratingly silly. I have no idea if they do enough to make it seem like a real world or not, other than saying names like Waterdeep or Neverwinter or Baldur’s Gate just to remind the nerds where this is set. There are enough little touches to keep it in synch with the source material, but they’re not precious about it. The music doesn’t swell dramatically when some deep cut or reference happens, things don’t slow down or go all glowy. The main characters don’t really care where they are or what they’re doing – even if the problems around them swell to the size of “this could be a big deal”, they’re just focused on getting through for a little bit longer.

That a ragtag group of peeps, human and otherwise are assembled to go on an adventure or a quest or a journey is pretty much a given, but no-one has to go too far, there’s no trekking over mountains or attempts to save the entire world from absolute evil – they’re trying to save one person, or get one thing, or steal a bunch of treasure, and not die too much.

I mean, the baddies are out for far more, but at least the main one is pretty petty. Hugh Grant went from an ageless charming stuttering playboy, to an aged shitbag who loves, relishes, playing the bad guy now in his charmy, smarmy way. In no way does he reach for the Jeremy Irons playbook to deliver this performance – as Forge, a former friend of the main characters, he’s an irredeemable chancer who’s in it not because he wants to destroy anything, but because he’s really, really greedy.

Chris Pine, proving again that he’s the best of the Chrises that dominate Hollywood, is perfectly suited to the main role of, um, whatever the fuck his name is. Edgin, I think, or just Ed. Ed such a simple name, easy for the audience to remember, not like a Raistlin Majere, or a Drizzt Do’Urden or a Fistandantilus.

Ed is the perfect audience surrogate: he too is a chancer, but not as much of a betraying shitbag as Forge, and it’s not really clear what skills he really brings to the table, other than convincingly lying to people. He is not a fighter, though he strums a mean lute, as a bard.

His motivation for everything, as he explains to us (in the form of a parole board, which has a bunch of fantasy freaks on it), is that he fucked something up, some bad people came to his house and killed his wife, who he actually loved (Georgie Landers), leaving their baby girl Kira (Chloe Coleman) without a mum. He’s been trying to get a magical doodad that will resurrect Zia. This being a magical realm of fantasy and whimsy, it’s a distinct possibility that such a thing could work.

But it’s a long and drawn out process to get to that moment. Along for the ride, and also to have someone be able to credibly fight lots of jerks in armour, something which a bard isn’t well-placed to do, there’s Ed’s best mate Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), who’s a barbarian and who lives to eat and fight. She and Ed have palled around for years, in fact she’s been helping to bring up Kira all these years, and is the only mum Kira really knew, until she and Ed got arrested for some shit.

Once that happened, creepy “uncle” Forge adopted her, and also somehow became the Lord of Neverwinter, some big city, with the help of a not at all creepy wizard called Sofina (Daisy Head), who mostly looks consumptive, but who comes alive when something nasty is happening.

You know the type – they live for drama.

It might seem redundant to point this out, but the script seems to genuinely take aspects of the D&D roleplaying experience on board and without much of an issue incorporate them into the action that befalls our heroes: as an example, a complex bridge that can only be crossed in a particular way that requires a complicated explanation AND acres of exposition, is destroyed before they even start, without so much as an embarrassed “sorry” by the dolt who fucked things up for everyone, which either symbolises someone failing a basic role or breaking the mechanics that were meant to provide hours of amusement / frustration for the team.

And when the team find a device that would circumvent all the difficulties they might face against their foes (ie. a game-breaking exploit), the screenplay (like a nervous DM, or the person running the game), constantly keeps throwing up obstructions that block its ability to fix every situation.

I liked the “solutions” the team routinely have to come up with, which felt very much in the spirit of the game, without detracting from the experience or making it too much of a nerdfest, and which were actually quite clever.

And of course, seeing an owlbear, or a displacer beast, or a mimic, or a gelatinous cube! The icing on the cake. If that kind of stuff matters to you *clears throat dramatically*. I can’t believe they got the displacer beast perfectly right!

Sure, among the expected elements, there’s the crappy magic user Simon (Justice Smith), who’s crappy only because he doesn’t believe in himself, and who could be really great – if only he could believe in himself. I guess he’s well-played, it’s wonderful when his character stops being so insecure. I relate too much to insecure characters, so I am happiest when I can pretend they don’t exist.

To counterbalance the general incompetence of the team, we get a “perfect” character that pops up and keeps the characters on the straight and narrow, just like a frustrated DM forcing the players back onto the “right” track that he or she or they have planned out. That paladin character, Xenk (Regé-Jean Page) is so fucking perfect the other characters loathe him, and yet he’s ever so good at everything he does.

Except for humour, or irony, or people not speaking literally. Have they lifted this character trait from Drax from the Guardians movies? Quite possibly, but it’s not like James Gunn invented humourless dolts.

I absolutely cracked up at the scene where he leaves the party, and walks away in a literal straight line – I almost peed myself, and I could not explain to you why. For all his competence and confidence, the opposite of the team, he doesn’t gel with them, and it’s best for everyone if he’d just go on his merry way once he’s served his purpose.

And then there’s the awesome Doric (Sophia Lillis), who’s a druid, and shapeshifts into the forms of various animals in order to escape from somewhere in a great and well thought out sequence. She has, I dunno, some motivation because the baddie (Hugh Grant) is also poorly scored on an environmental level. She is not Poison Ivy protecting the plants from the human world, but she does wear green and has red hair, I’m just saying.

What works best is that within all the character dynamics and the action sequences, the light touch of the directors makes sure it feels fleet of foot, and that it doesn’t get too bogged down by either superfluous bullshit or with stuff general audiences aren’t going to care about.

The stuff with the Red Wizards and Thay and undead liches and stuff; no-one could possibly care about that stuff or their machinations, so the fact that they have no motivations or backstory, even though there is a flashback showing them do something nefarious a hundred years in the past, we don’t need to know, we don’t need to care, we just need to know if the good guys, even after they get what they were after, are going to stand up for the peasants of Neverwinter, or whether they’re going to be selfish chumps and leave everyone to die.

Maybe they overemphasised some parts of Edgin’s grief a bit too much, but at all times Chris Pine charms his way through the flick, and works as a believable leader whose happy for everyone else to star and do the heavy lifting. He’s a perfect match both for the violent and surly platonic life partner Holga, as well as the counterpoint to the smarmy ruthlessness of Hugh Grant’s Forge, who is a dastardly piece of shit but such an enjoyable one. I want to watch a whole movie where it’s just him trying to convince people that he’s not bullshitting them, and then running away from them.

They all deserve more movies. This stuff could work, again and again, with no possibility of diminishing returns. There are now thousands and thousands of Star Wars movies and Marvel movies and episodes of series, and every single one is better than the last, with no signs of creative burnout, repetition, odious fan service or reliance purely on nostalgia.

No, it’ll never happen. But, you know, it’s not for the benefit of regular people, who will watch this, fart, turn off the telly and then go to sleep. No, it’s purely for the fat old nerds like me, this is the purest catnip I could ever possibly imagine.

7 times if anyone is going to engineer the next virus, it should be programmed to take out the old nerds out of 10

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“Holga doesn't like to be disturbed when she's eating her potatoes, that's kind of the highlight of her day.” – it’s the highlight of anyone’s day - Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves