Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

The reason why a lot of sword & sorcery-style fantasy films fail is that they have to do a lot before they can even get going. They have to establish a whole world, plus the characters, plus a bunch of other stuff (how does magic work? What's the deal with weird creatures?), and they have to do so in such a way that the plot isn't going to seem silly. Most of these movies are built around quests, but unless you really establish the stakes behind that quest, you're just looking at people wandering around some made-up place trying to find some made up thing.

All of this is difficult but hardly impossible. What is impossible - or would seem to be if you still remember fantasy stoner comedy Your Highness - is doing all that in such a way to make comedy possible. Which is a problem: comedy is essential to a Dungeons & Dragons movie, because if you've ever played a session of D&D you know that people mess around and make jokes.

The central plot in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is basically to reunite a family, which adds a bit more heart to what is otherwise a series of quests to get magic objects and loot treasure (classic D&D). There's also fights, with magic and without, plus some classic monsters (an Owlbear! A Gelatinous Cube!) and a pretty bulky dragon. D&D (the game) isn't really about defeating evil schemes so much but there's one here and it's satisfyingly sinister - in short, the story ticks all the boxes without feeling like an exercise in ticking boxes.

More important is the tone, which Honour Among Thieves gets exactly right. The opening scene, which involves a bunch of (serious) backstory at a parole hearing while constantly undercutting the seriousness - it's also going to be an escape attempt of sorts - sets the level, and it doesn't put a foot wrong from there. They even get a good joke out of a bunch of brain eating creatures passing them by because they're not tasty enough to bother with.

The characters bicker and banter but not to excess, the adventure is more rollicking than nail-biting, and the performances are spot on. Everyone has good chemistry, and fortunately the fantasy genre is so jam packed with cliches this manages to avoid some of the more obvious ones (no weathered wizards here) while still feeling like it's firmly part of the genre. 

The fighter (Michelle Rodriguez) is gruff (and has a thing for halflings, who are not named and yes that is Bradley Cooper), the magic user (Justice Smith) is battling confidence issues, the shape-shifter (Sophia Lillis) is slightly more serious and mistrustful, and the Paladin (Rene-Jean Page) is extremely Good (at everything, including avoiding becoming the straight man for a bunch of jokes). You've even got Hugh Grant as a dodgy con man turned ruler who is a bad guy but the kind of bad guy who's up front that he's bad so you can't really hold it against him. He's a fun character, and he's not even central to the story.

Someone who is central is Chris Pine, despite playing a character - he used to be a kind of undercover ranger, then he became a thief, now he's mostly playing the lute - who is so superfluous other characters actually ask "why do we need you?" As he's shown in everything else he's done, he can be charming and lightweight while still delivering the goods dramatically when needed, and though his character really doesn't map onto Dungeons & Dragons (the game) at all, he brings that kind of "I'm the leader but I'm kind of crap but I'm still going to get the job done" energy that these kind of movies (*cough Guardians of the Galaxy cough*) love

For a movie that's over two hours it doesn't feel drawn out or excessive, and for a movie that leaves the door wide open to sequels the ending is satisfyingly conclusive. The real takeaway is that it's funnier than you might expect; would that all Hollywood adventures could get this many laughs out of resurrecting the dead.

- Anthony Morris