Review: Dungeons and Dragons movie just barely makes its saving throw

First Stranger Things succeeded in making people nostalgic for a role-playing game they have probably never played. Now, Paramount comes in with Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. The film stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, and Sophia Lillis as a band of unlikely heroes on a quest to save a kingdom from the clutches of Hugh Grant. Is the movie worth the dungeon crawl to the movie theaters?

Going into this film, I didn’t have the highest of expectations, and lucky for me, because I was able to walk away more or less content. For any critics going on and on about how all movies are becoming Marvel movies, Honor Among Thieves is a good example of what they’re talking about, because there is no ignoring how derivative it is. This isn’t surprising; the Marvel formula is a proven money maker and it’s to be expected that other studios would follow it. That means the movie has some familiar pros and cons.

On the pro side, I’ll give Dungeons and Dragons this: it had a lot of nice ideas for set pieces and action scenes. The world of D&D has a unique set of rules, abilities, and inhabitants, and the film mines them for inspiration. I enjoyed the scene where Sophia Lillis’s character, a druid who can turn into different species, escapes from guards with a series of transformations. There’s another escape scene involving a very chubby dragon that’s very fun.

The action scenes are the best parts of the film. And that’s probably what you expect from his kind of movie, but it’s still not great that every other aspect is underserved.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is fun but formulaic

So here come the cons, starting with the characters. They’re all a bit archetypal, but that fits in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, so I didn’t mind. What I did mind were the character arcs and the very dumb jokes.

Let’s start with the arcs, all of which feel undercooked. Chris Pine’s character wants to restore his daughter’s faith in him, while Justice Smith’s and Sophia Lillis’s characters are involved in a romance. Neither of these get enough focus to feel meaningful, so why have them at all? “There has to be an emotional aspect for audiences to latch on to!” I imagine the screenwriter saying. Maybe, but here the emotions feel like afterthoughts and drag the film down.

Continuing with the cons, the writing is not great. Structurally the story is fine, though I didn’t like having the majority of the characters introduced via flashback in the first half. I’d rather the story start where it starts, you know? Meanwhile, the dialog can over explain itself.

And then there are the jokes, which are typical Marvel-tier dreck you’ve heard over and over again. The only joke that got me involved questioning a dead warrior in a graveyard. Beyond that, it’s all non-sequiturs or “cute, silly” interactions that bring the story to a halt. They even have the shame to do the “I’m sure you would have done the same for me” joke. Its decisions to include “jokes” like that that makes me think Joseph McCarthy had a point with the writer blacklist.

If you’ll allow me a side tangent here to complain about one particular joke: at one point Michelle Rodriguez’s character, a sort of badass barbarian type, goes to meet her lost love, a halfling played by a major actor in a surprise cameo. If the actor in this scene was a nobody, there would be nothing special about it. The only reason it would get laughs is if people recognize the guy playing the halfling, rather than for anything in the script. It’s lazy celebrity baiting.

Verdict

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Overall it’s a decently fun adventure movie hampered by an uninspired script.

Would I recommend it? Well, let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t not recommend it. Chances are you won’t walk away feeling like you wasted your time. But you could also skip this movie and watch Thor: Love and Thunder or Ant-Man and the Wasp or any number of other Marvel or Marvel-esque movies and walk away with the same feeling. If the movie had taken itself more seriously and tried to break out of the patterns established by Disney, I think this film could have been the start of a more memorable series. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves offers more of the same.

Grade: C

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels