by Greg Uke, Reporter

I am a gigantic Dungeons & Dragons nerd. 

So when I went to watch Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I was gnashing my nerd teeth and actively looking for things to complain about. The main reason for this, if I’m honest, is that I still remember the old Dungeons & Dragons movie from 23 years ago. I’m talking about the bad one that came out before COVID forced us all indoors for two years and popularized tabletop gaming. Back then it was not as “cool” to be into such things, and that movie made it worse. It was so campy and cringe-worthy that it made D&D look stupid, and by extension those who played it were denigrated. 

I was expecting something similar with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But the thing about going into a movie looking for flaws is….naturally you find them. And the movie knew that too. So to shock me out of my preconceptions it did something I didn’t expect. It slapped me hard, several times, with humor and easter eggs that only a D&D fan would catch while simultaneously telling a very solid story for all the viewers who had no history with the game. It was a delicate line to walk, and I’m pleased to say Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves did this surprisingly well. 

Let me start with the good stuff. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was fairly faithful to the Forgotten Realms setting. It included evil factions and monsters I recognized, and it did so in a way that wasn’t terribly corny. The movie also tossed in cool magical effects directly from the game. D&D players familiar with these effects are meant to recognize their fidelity to the rules and appreciate it (which I did). The comedy was good, the banter was witty, there were a number of “in” jokes which poked fun at the rules, and the more serious plot elements were delivered with a depth of feeling that seemed neither contrived nor over the top. I even liked the bard music Chris Pine belted out, and historically bard players are almost NEVER able to roleplay their performing skills in a way that doesn’t come across as lame. 

D&D is based around the concept of adventuring parties using teamwork to overcome challenges with the skills and abilities they possess. The movie showcases this quite well, even delving into the creative and comical use of magic trinkets and spells to do things which would normally be illegal. Bypassing traps or puzzles with lateral thinking drives storytellers like me up the wall and ruins hours of careful planning, and they knew that. Little elements like these make Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves satisfying to watch because the writers were able to create a great movie which simultaneously gratifies AND needles people like me. 

To the uninitiated, there are some corny moments which require context. The paladin is obnoxiously noble and semi-condescending because this is a classic failing of such characters. The fact that the movie points this out and makes fun of him is a nod to D&D players everywhere, but a casual viewer wouldn’t know this. Characters stopping at an inopportune time to tell their tragic backstory is also something those in the know sigh and roll their eyes at, because it’s a thing. Mocking the party’s lack of smarts because all of the character “classes” in the team traditionally have a mediocre intelligence stat made me laugh so hard. They even flipped the classic red dragon trope (which no D&D movie may do without) onto its head in a way that was faithful to an existing published module (the dragon is named and in the books). All in all it was full of unexpected surprises. 

I won’t lie, it’s hard for me to critique this movie fairly because I know so much about this game and its setting that my impulse is to nitpick every little thing. On the subject of acting, Chris Pine (Star Trek) plays an interesting bard (Edgin). He appears to have captured the essence of a rogueish character without it coming across as foolish, which I appreciated. Michelle Rodriguez (LOST) DOMINATED her role as the Uthgardt barbarian woman Holga. Her blunt low-charisma behavior was terrific, her combat sequences were awesome, and her past romantic life choices had me simultaneously cringing and tearing up with laughter. Hugh Grant (Forge the conman) and Rege-Jeane Page (Xenk the paladin) were both so unapologetically smug it made me hope they got punched, which means they did their jobs well. I found Sophia Lillis’ druid (Doric) a bit weak on the acting and personality front, but her high level of action and general “participation” in the events of the story ensured her character didn’t feel stapled on. Justice Smith was probably the weakest actor of the team in his role as Simon the Sorcerer, but that may have been intentional since his character development pretty much required making people irritated with him. Chloe Coleman did a remarkably good job in her role as Kira, the daughter of Edgin, in the sense that her innocent act didn’t come across as clueless or vapid. And the villain….was okay, but she was very stoic and didn’t say much so it was hard to judge her performance, even if that turned out to be perfectly justified by the story. Daisy Head did well enough as Sofina the red wizard, even though I wish she had more lines and interaction. 

Official Synopsis:

A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.  Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the rich world and playful spirit of the legendary roleplaying game to the big screen in a hilarious and action-packed adventure.

Rating:
ComicsOnline gives Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves – 4.5/5 subverted expectations.

*****

No, you know what? What the hell. I’m going to do it. If you are interested in learning why it didn’t get a perfect score from a D&D fan, we can get into the nitpicks. 

Fair warning: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT. 

.

.

.

.

.

.

Here we go: 

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was way too noblebright to be Dungeons & Dragons. In the parlance of role-playing games there is a pejorative term for something being too dark and edgy, called “grimdark”. The opposite of this is “noblebright”, which implies a setting where everything neatly falls into place, heroes never die, and life is like an episode of My Little Pony. D&D is supposed to have dark and scary moments intermixed with heroism, humor, and high adventure. This movie did not strike that balance. At no time did I feel any dramatic tension whatsoever. Adventurers in D&D go around killing stuff and managing resources to overcome lethal challenges, but nobody got injured until the very end. Nobody needed healing. I saw zero blood. 

This brings me to my next point: a distinct lack of danger. Most of the “peril” in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is simply used as a prelude to comedy or to subtly poke fun at the game. Some of the flashback sequences had a decent slice of darkness, but those were flashbacks. Apart from beating up some guards and a brief duel with some assassins, everything was chipmunks and lollipops. Only one member of the entire party even HAD A WEAPON, and that’s only because she stole it. Nobody else even had so much as a dagger. 

The druid Doric was supposed to be a tiefling; a person born with fiendish heritage and infernal or demonic physical traits. She did not look remotely evil or fiendish at all. She looked like a smokin hot irish faerie girl with horns, a cute tail, white skin, and very red hair. Nothing about her said “The Nine Hells” or “The Abyss”. Instead it said “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Irish Faeries Are Cool”. And the instant after she complained about humanity discriminating against her, we never heard about it again. Not a single peasant rock was thrown.  

Also…druids can only turn into animals. They cannot turn into owlbears, and we know this because many have tried to argue that they SHOULD be able to turn into owlbears in forums because of their awesome combat ability, but Wizards of the Coast kept slapping that down. Tyrannosaurs are okay though. Don’t ask why. 

Chris Pine’s character, Edgin the Bard, was useless. The druid even points out how useless he is at one point to make fun of bards. Real bards in D&D are supposed to be skillful, knowledgeable, and spellcasters. As much as I loved his acting, emasculating Edgin to dramatize Holgas’ badassery felt unfair. 

Edgin the Bard is also supposed to have been a Harper. The Harpers are a SECRET society whose self-avowed goal is to preserve culture and prevent the abuse of power using espionage. They are NOT THE GOVERNMENT. Governments do not like Harpers because whenever a government becomes too powerful the Harpers show up like goody goody assholes and sabotage it to make sure the world remains a patchwork of impotent city-states. The idea that the protagonists would have been caught and thrown into a supermax jail for robbing a secret Harper vault is like saying the CIA would lock someone up for making PETA angry. 

The primary antagonists are the Red Wizards of Thay; a dust blown slave empire thousands of miles to the east where evil wizards rule and the citizens customarily shave their bodies. Apparently they are also the only magicians in the world. Every government supposedly has a bunch of magicians (or they’d be helpless), yet for the sake of this movie Sofina and Simon are the ONLY spellcasters out there. The druid and the bard should both have had magic, but in this world druids are just people who can turn into animals. And the idea that some (very obviously bald) mage could just walk into one of the most important cities in the world and do whatever she pleased to its ruler without getting caught and murdered by other spellcasters was sad.  

Lesser gripes include:

There is no such thing as a spell, or a staff, that acts like the gun from the game PORTAL. Every effect in the game that creates portals like that (and there are VERY few) is super brief, and the portals are NOT mobile or placeable onto movable objects. And if such a magical staff DID exist, it wouldn’t have been kept by a halfling as a walking stick that he just sort of picked up from somewhere…so his ex-girlfriend could take it with her when she cleared out. That’s the second dumbest excuse for a magic item showing up in a campaign I’ve ever heard. It did make a cool plot device though. 

Oh, you want the dumbest? Ok. A necklace that allows someone to become invisible at will is a Legendary (top tier) magical item, and not something that would have been accidentally hanging in a shop window for thieves to steal. 

Speaking with the dead is a divine spell. If anyone was going to do that it should have been the paladin, not Simon the Insecure Sorcerer. Yes, he supposedly used a magical trinket he had. But that trinket also appears to have been usable at will on as many corpses as he wanted. Never heard of it. 

Mimics (horrible fanged shapeshifting blobs that commonly disguise themselves as inanimate objects like chests) have a glue they hit you with that makes you stick to them for easier eating. The barbarian chick did not get stuck and eaten. Sadness. 

Gelatinous Cubes are monsters. They slide after you and try to engulf you, and if they succeed they melt you in a very short amount of time. Leaping into one as an escape tactic is a bad idea. This is what you look like after being in a gelatinous cube: https://youtu.be/q1OTkcD6qfs?t=41

Displacer beasts are nasty, yes, but it helps if you FIGHT them. Nobody fought the thing. Okay, it can look like it’s standing a few feet away from where it really is. But that’s not an insurmountable obstacle. I was irritated by the whole “oh no, please god, anything but the invincible displacer beast” thing. Guys…it has 85 hit points and a challenge rating of three. Three. 

Traveling from the northern corner of Icewind Dale to Neverwinter to the Evermoors to the Kryptgarden Forest to Nesme to god knows where else is a journey of hundreds of miles. Each way. And there are monsters and all kinds of bad stuff. These transitions all take place instantly, like they’re just tossing out rando names with no sense of scale. It’s not like going from Joey’s moms backyard down the street to Franklin’s dads backyard to throw waterballoons at his sister Katie because she’s pretty and 17 years old and we’re crushing on her, but we’re 13 year old dumbasses and don’t know a more suave way to communicate that.

I’m sure if I tried really hard I could dig up more, but there’s only so much spleen venting one can do and apart from all these little things it really was a very well done movie. So I’ll call it here.

Thank you for reading! 

…

Choose your own adventure with ComicsOnline.com on Facebook and Twitter for more reviews, exclusive interviews, and everything geek pop culture!