Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Review: Putting the Fun Back in the Fantasy Adventure Genre

Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist

We pretty much have to accept the fact that we’re going to rarely get tentpole movies based on original IP. Do you want a movie with a $100 million dollar budget? It has to be based on “something” people (usually 40+-year-old people) know.

I don’t like this, but it’s what it is.

The best we can hope for is the movie simply uses the IP to get attention and then creates an original movie that could stand alone without the IP or really any knowledge of the IP.

This is what we got from ‘Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’, and it mostly succeeds at creating a rollicking good time that’s both funny (although not quite LOL funny, at least to me) and adventurous while creating a pretty captivating fantasy adventure tale that could stand alone without any comedy.  

‘Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ is fundamentally a heist movie with a rag-tag team starring Chris Pine as the leader and the planner, with no other real skills to note other than ambition, Michelle Rodriguez as the muscle, Justice Smith as a young wizard who is not particularly good at his craft, but trying to gain confidence throughout the movie, and Sophia Lillis as a druid who is basically a shapeshifter that can turn into any animal she wants.

They are trying to rescue Chris Pine’s character’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) from the wonderfully dastardly Forge (Hugh Grant), whose strings are being pulled by a red wizard who wants to do nefarious things to their world (I’ll leave the particulars out to enjoy them yourself as it is unveiled. Trust me, I’m not spoiling anything).

Chris Pine is playing a very Chris Pine type of character, and he is great. He has effortless charisma and a great ability to make wise-cracking and self-deprecating humor work in any scenario. You wouldn’t think that’s what you want in a fantasy adventure movie, but once you see it, you get it.

What also worked for the movie is this could have been a movie that made fun of the very genre it inhabits (an emerging trope across various genres), and it does the opposite: it embraces the genre; it just makes the most fun out of what is mostly a deadly serious, epic genre.

Hugh Grant is also doing fine work here, playing to his strengths with a slippery character who tries to con his way out of every situation. Can’t for certain say this was perfect casting, but Grant is great for the role and gives you a great human juxtaposition to the main group of heroes, some of whom have magical abilities.

I have two main complaints about this movie:

1)      The pairing of Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez as the leads were odd when it was announced (it’s not quite Oscar and Felix from The Odd Couple, but it is close as far as contrasting styles of onscreen personas), and, for me, although (thank god) they are never romantic together, their chemistry as the lead starring actors never worked for me in this movie. I get why they cast them here; she has a big fan base thanks to the ‘Fast and Furious’ movies, but there’s a better movie with different casting.

2)      Just be prepared; this is not a movie that sits on its laurels for long. It’s going from one scene to the next, from one plot twist to another, at a fairly speedy clip, even though the run time is over 2 hours. There are moments in other adventure movies that usually take a few minutes for the characters to soak in the twist or really game plan how to react to the challenge, but ‘Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ lets the characters think for a few seconds, figure out the solution, and advance. Better movies really draw out this process. Again, probably a complaint for the over-40 crowd; I doubt younger audiences will care; just be prepared either way!

Overall, I had a great time in the theatre. I enjoy the fantasy adventure genre, Chris Pine and Hugh Grant, and the movie deliver on all three fronts. This is probably not a movie that will stick with you for too long, but it is also a movie that is not trying to do too much. They take time to get into the characters’ backstories, but they don’t spend much time world-building. It is a movie that is meant to be a standalone adventure, although it is a movie that will likely leave you wanting more sequels.

(However, I’ll admit, I was thinking during this movie that this might have been better suited for an 8 episode Netflix show based on how fast it was going through most of the plot developments)

Basically, what I liked most about it is you could go it knowing nothing about the IP, and have a great time, while not being left hanging about the future story that may (or may not) come.

3.5/4 stars