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Dungeons & Dragons Rolls a Twelve with Advantage


I don’t think you’ll find better proof of the much-lamented (or much-celebrated) “Marvel-ization” of Hollywood blockbusters than Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which in its broad yet choppy structure, Whedon-esque quippy and irony-drenched sense of humour, and safely calculated storytelling beats, fits exactly into the typically unadventurous mould of the modern superhero boom. By that token though, it is quite a bit better than a lot of those movies now, because even from a place of concrete formula it is capable of summoning an energy and enthusiasm off of the charm and specifities of its brand and experience-informed design. It’s essentially a Marvel movie in fantasy garb, but one of the better ones, from maybe a few phases ago.
That is to say the movie is fun, and it definitely knows exactly who it is pitching to. As formerly niche arenas of geek culture like comic books and Star Wars have for some time now been the industry mainstream, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feels like the first truly nerdy movie in quite some time. Much as D&D has become somewhat ubiquitous, the venerated original RPG is still a staple of geek culture firmly outside of the wider cultural consciousness. It’s an elaborate, mathematical, make-belief but also heavily rule-based game that involves creativity on the part of the players and is not the kind of thing you could easily explain to your grandparents. It is, I’m sorry to say (and this is coming from someone who has played and enjoyed D&D), explicitly, fundamentally uncool.
And so this movie represents one of the last bastions of geek culture being sold for the first time as cool to the general public -a modern equivalent for instance of when Fox was first developing X-Men. However where that movie took strides to erase it’s source comic book identity, this Dungeons & Dragons embraces it -while simultaneously acquiescing  to the tone and aesthetic demands of what makes a movie hit with audiences in 2023.
All of the signatures are there from the diversity of game-based races and classes to art and production design clearly based on the recent, popular aesthetics for D&D materials, to of course the core conceit of a band of heroes with disparate abilities going on a campaign together. The movie features several in-jokes and references for D&D fans, including most amusingly a few lampshades of several of the franchise’s clichés; such as an overabundance of melodramatic backstories and convoluted exposition, the arbitrary, convenient, and somewhat gimmicky nature of magic and its rules, and the one-dimensional tenor of NPCs -it’s somewhat true of the protagonists as well and I don’t know that that’s an intentional commentary on the personalities players bring to their characters but I was amused by how Justice Smith’s fake English accent sounds exactly like the kind of voice an overzealous player might employ.
A mark in the film’s favour in spite of all of this though is a fairly simple premise. Edgin (Chris Pine) and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) are adventurers who escape the prison where they’ve been interred since a heist gone wrong to reunite with Edgin’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman), whose been in the custody of their old ally Forge (Hugh Grant), now the Lord of a wealthy city. But Forge has turned on them, manipulated Kira, and allied with an evil Red Wizard Sofina (Daisy Head) -and so Edgin and Holga go on a quest to recruit a new team and find some macguffins with the end goal of invading the castle, stealing Forge’s gold, and rescuing Kira.
The movie is written and directed by Game Night’s Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who make some smart choices where it concerns things like sets and effects. Certainly there are your usual sequences rendered entirely through CGI and green-screen -most notably a portion of the movie set in the “Underdark”; but there’s an adequate balance struck between this and tangible sets as well as a handful of practical creature designs. Additionally, this is a film with texture, radiant and colourful -the first fantasy-themed project in a while not seemingly afraid of its own whimsy. Certainly it looks better than The Witcher or the last few seasons of Game of Thrones. There was care put in to make this world feel real, and while it’s got nothing on old-school fantasy movies from the 80s and early 2000s, it’s nice to actually feel transported by a Hollywood blockbuster again. While Goldstein and Daley’s direction isn’t particularly inventive it is refreshingly technically dynamic in some of the shot and editing choices. Small things, but they make a difference.
The filmmakers make clever use of several D&D devices, which in addition to the charm of the party dynamic makes it both endearingly familiar to fans and even attractive to newcomers (there was one person at the end of my screening who loudly asked to join someone’s campaign). Though perhaps inadvertently part of that effect comes from audiences seeing themselves or their own D&D characters in the figures on screen, who are generally avatars based in stock personalities and even a couple of those in-game clichés. The overconfident egotistical bard, the brooding tough barbarian, the grandiloquent humourless paladin, etc. Pine is as smooth and charming as ever but even as the self-appointed protagonist his characterization is a bit thin, to say nothing of that of Rodriguez’s Holga or Sophia Lillis’ tiefling druid Doric or Regé-Jean Page’s ancient hero Xenk. There’s a bit of an interesting idea to Smith’s Simon -a half-elf sorcerer with confidence issues whose not actually that good a sorcerer -but for the most part the characters are relatively flat by design -though Pine and Rodriguez’s performances at least are enough to soften this. Grant also is a delight, as he adapts his own stereotypical manner into a great weaselly performance that is consistently entertaining. At times it feels like it could belong in The Princess Bride.
The film’s pacing is notably uneven in places too –much as it might acknowledge overwrought devices like backstory exposition, it doesn’t make them any less distracting from the overarching flow when they come up. But then the story itself, much like a campaign, is fairly segmented, and overall works well within these bounds. I also appreciate the neat way it manages to incorporate other “parties” in its choice of climax (one of which seems to consist amusingly of cosplayers rather than presumably authentic-to-this-universe adventurers). However, the last act is also where some of the weakest elements story-wise come into play. The movie’s themes of failure and found family, consciously evocative of Guardians of the Galaxy, don’t materialize very meaningfully throughout, and amidst the fun heist action are undercut by a couple sudden rash character choices meant to hastily resolve or ratify them. And for the creativity and visual energy that is put into the climactic fight, it’s final note and aftermath are disappointingly mundane, very much hammering home the movie’s MCU reflection.
Doubtless there’s some messiness to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves –of story, character, theme, humour; but it’s a messiness that more than anything resembles the kind of RPG it is based on, and in which it is able to resonate fun. The movie doesn’t hit all marks, particularly where it tries to find pathos and depth, but it hits the ones that matter most in a fairly generic yet refreshed and endearingly enthusiastic way. One thing it accomplishes in addition to turning on new players is emphasizing the vast scope of the franchise it clearly wishes to birth. It’s success likely assures that fruition –and I’m more curious about Dungeons & Dragons than I’ve been for any new movie brand in a long time.
 
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