Review: "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"
A sturdy, heartfelt adventure flick with style
I really had zero expectations for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves based on the mostly-tepid marketing, and only took the trip to the theater based on the positive word-of-mouth. Even then, I think all I expected was a decently fun and irreverent comedy, a goofball diversion on a slow night. The true surprise of Honor Among Thieves is that it’s actually a lot more than that: It’s a handsomely mounted, extremely imaginative character-driven adventure with a great cast and a whole lot of heart. This is the kind of four-quadrant popcorn romp Hollywood has largely forgotten how to make, and while it will no doubt delight Dungeons & Dragons fans, it’s a film I’d happily recommend to just about anybody. This is just a damn good time at the movies.
Of course, the thing about Dungeons & Dragons is that even if you’ve never played a campaign – I haven’t, though I’ve followed media around its periphery – you’ve undoubtedly interacted with something it influenced. D&D’s impact is so vast that if you’ve ever played a video game with even mild RPG elements, you’ve seen its ideas at work; a fan of Skyrim or Dragon Quest is just as likely to find shared points of interest in Honor Among Thieves as an actual D&D player. And the kinds of passionate, inventive stories D&D pushes players to develop with each other is a great match for a movie, so long as you find the right people to develop it.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley clearly fit the bill, and I probably should have had higher expectations for this film given their work on the outstanding comedy Game Night. But what they’ve done here is taken the general shape of a good D&D campaign and their obvious enthusiasm for the world of the game – Daley got his start as a child actor on the great Freaks and Geeks, which ended with an infamous D&D-themed episode – and channeled it into a movie that checks all the boxes on character and story while providing a whole lot of impressive action and some very big laughs. It gets the fundamentals of what a D&D movie should do (I, for instance, was tickled by the moment where the heroes have to grab their gear again after getting captured and having it taken away – one of the oldest RPG tropes in the book) but then it goes on to do a whole lot more.
This is just a very well-mounted production, for one. Right off the bat, the use of real locations and practical (and beautifully designed and lived-in) sets and costumes gives this a tactile immediacy that’s completely absent in your average multiplex fare these days, and I just love the general look of the world. It’s a fun, interesting place to inhabit, and it feels like a living, breathing place. And as the film gets going, you realize Goldstein and Daley’s skills as directors have become pretty prodigious, with each action set piece providing a huge dose of creativity and technical acumen. An elaborate effects-driven “single-take” chase sequence is probably the film’s most rousing highlight, but every set piece has a unique idea and really impressive execution, with fluid choreography that’s captured clearly and cleanly. There’s a constant sense of passionate invention to how the characters move through and interact with this world, one entirely befitting the Dungeons and Dragons name. The final act gets particularly creative with how it deploys the various tools the protagonists have collected, and how it shows them all working as a team.
And that team is just a delight to follow, as the heroes of any good D&D campaign should be. Chris Pine reminds us that he’s almost certainly the best Chris, all the down-to-earth energy and charisma he brought to bear on the Star Trek films used here in a production that makes better all-around use of his talents (now that I’m thinking about it, Goldstein & Daley would be obvious candidates for a Star Trek film, if Paramount had any idea what they were doing with that franchise). Michelle Rodriguez, stranded in a pretty thankless role in the recent Fast and Furious films, hasn’t had this much fun in a long time, and Regé-Jean Page’s 2nd-act role as the Paladin is a real scene stealer. I think I was most impressed by Justice Smith here, as a bumbling sorcerer slowly gaining a sense of confidence, and if I have any complaints about the film, it’s that I wanted to see even more of Sophia Lillis as the druid, Doric. It says a lot about how deep the bench is that Hugh Grant is here as a primary antagonist – and is an absolutely delightful bastard in the role – but that he’s the last name I feel the need to praise.
Honestly, this one kind of blew me away, not in the sense that it’s a game-changing masterpiece, but that it’s just so sturdy and well-crafted. It’s not just a better and more passionately realized use of the D&D license than you’d ever expect Hollywood to produce, but flat out one of the better popcorn flicks in recent memory, a charming and exciting adventure film that moves with a real sense of confidence. The film hasn’t necessarily performed poorly at the box office, but the marketing was rough, and sandwiching its release in between John Wick 4 and The Super Mario Bros. Movie was clearly a mistake, limiting how much momentum it can hope to ride from good word-of-mouth. I hope it continues to find an audience – I suspect it will become big on home video and streaming – and I’d certainly be down for a sequel. This is such a good team, I’d love to see what they’d get up to in a second campaign.