Movie Review : Dungeons & Dragons - Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Dungeons & Dragons is the most famous tabletop role playing game. It's almost 50 years old, it's been played by millions of people around the world and it's even been accused of being Satanic in the eighties. Are you even big if no one ever accused you of Satanism? There's a lot of love for Dungeons & Dragons and it's a known fact that any loved franchise of anything is going to get a movie adaptation at some point. It already had four, but the biggest and most hard-hitting was yet to come… or not.
Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves came out and crashed like a wet fart in late March and I’m here to tell you it was inevitable. It's not bad, but it’s not good either. It’s a movie that makes you feel nothing at all.
The movie tells the story of a thief named Edgin (the underappreciated Chris Pine) and a warrior named Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) who break out from jail two years after spectacularly failing at stealing a scroll that would bring Edgin's wife back to life. When they escape, they find out their coconspirators Forge (Hugh Grant) and Sofina (Daisy Head) are now ruling the realm and raising Edgin’s daughter (Chloe Coleman) and lying to her about her father’s motivation, prompting an inevitable confrontation.
When Being Boring and Being Entertaining Become The Same Thing
The main selling point of Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves is that it's set within the world of Forgotten Realms and that it's filled with Easter Eggs for people who have played Dungeons & Dragons in the past. But this screenplay could’ve worked for any movies, really. Outside of Forgotten Realms or even outside of a medieval setting, really. Dude goes to jail for something wrong done under legit circumstances, fucks his family in the process and finds out his offspring is getting manipulated when he gets out.
Didn’t Shakespeare write this 500 years ago?
Although it explicitly references the tabletop RPG to whoever has played it (I sure did), the screenplay for Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves is stale and predictable. Because there's a 150 million dollars of budget behind it. Because when that kind of money is involved in a projet like this, no one will ever let it come to screen if it's bad. But in this case, the most sensible thing Paramount could’ve done was to release a bad movie. Something that made you feel like you've done something with two hours of your life.
It was never going to be as fun as playing the game itself. Because when you’re playing the game, you're inject some of yourself in the narrative. The character living the adventure is largely you. Outside of a few technical wink-winks, that thrill would always elude the movie. Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves is just a 150 million dollars thing that was made to make you "have a good time" for two hours and not question whether you could've used that time more cautiously afterwards.
But don’t lie to yourself. It made you feel a little hollow inside afterwards. It's not something you’re going to remember in a year.
What the fuck, Chris Pine?
I like Chris Pine more than most critics. I believe he played a solid Jordan Peterson-inspired cult leader in Don’t Worry Darling (he was the best thing in that movie) and that he's going to age well if he makes the right choices. But what are the right career choices? It all comes down to art. The quintessential fantasy nerd movie is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and these films work because of two reasons: 1) the story was already written and loved 2) what made that story unique was painstakingly reproduced on screen.
The quirks and intricacies. What makes a Hobbit a Hobbit and whatnot Everyone can come up with the big, sweeping battles, but they don’t mean anything if no one cares about the small stuff.
It's not the case with Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves, which rushes through its scenes hoping you're not going to notice how it recycles easy jokes that have been told over and over in movies. The Dungeons & Dragons of it is superficial. It's meant to make you spend movie, laugh a little and forget about it in time for the next Paramount project. A film like Lord of the Rings aims to change you. It wants to make you care about things you haven’t cared before. It wants to make you a better human being.
That's what art is supposed to do. It wants to entertain you, but it’s never content with that. I'm probably being harsh to Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves. It's fine. It's what you call a serviceable that aims to make you have a good time, but movies like this shouldn't fucking exist. You deserve films like Lord of the Rings or, I don’t know, Matt Reeves’ Batman, which have something of their own to trade you for your money. Something satisfying. Not necessarily profound, but engaging and thorough.
*
I didn't really hate Dungeons & Dragons : Honor Among Thieves, but I really hate that a movie like this exists. It is devoid of wit and creativity and clumsily borrows the latter from an existing without ever making the effort to understand what made it so charming in the first place. Nerds : stop wanting feature films of your favorite franchises, for fuck’s sake. People in Hollywood don't care about you as a person, but they know you'll pay for anything tied to your favorite intellectual property and it's what happened here.
Fuck this movie that made me feel like a boring chump for watching it. If armchair philosophers blame TikTok and Dave Portnoy's pizza reviews for ruining culture, I blame movies like this. I'd rather watch nothing but Dave Portnoy’s pizza reviews for a whole year if it means that I’d never have to watch movies like this again. At least I’d thousands of great pizza spots from it.
