Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

What’s The Movie? Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

What’s It All About, JG? Testing my patience. However, for the record, roguish and presumably-charming Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) and the subtly-named barbarian Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), escape from prison to try and resurrect his dead wife and reconnect with his estranged daughter, Kira (an insufferably brattish Chloe Coleman). In the absence of her jailed father and her dead mother, she’s fallen under the “care and protection” of Forge Fitzwilliam (an equally insufferable Hugh Grant) who has some plan about getting rich or something but it’s really difficult to give a shit. A Red Wizard was responsible for Edgin and Kilgore’s arrest so must be perfunctorily defeated by the end of the movie. Edgin puts together a motley band consisting of Kilgore, half-arsed sorcerer Simon Aumar (Justice Smith), tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), and paladin Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page). The rest of the movie is basically a heist as they first try and get the Tablet of Reawakening to bring back Edgin’s missus, then rescue his daughter from Forge’s nefarious clutches. In the end, there’s a far-from-spectacular battle, Forge is defeated but escapes to fight another day, and the Tablet is used to save Kilgore, fatally wounded in the “climactic” battle with the Red Wizard, rather than the absent wife.

Why Did You Give It A Go? Christ knows. But my fella was out of town for a few days, I’m sofa-bound thanks to an accident, and I needed something to fill the time with. So a light-hearted fantasy full of japes and jokes should just about hit the mark, right? You’d think…

Is It Any Good? It suuuuuucks. Sucks so hard. It’s quite amazing how you can take something as simple as a basic heist/quest premise and screw it up so royally, yet here we are. It just shouldn’t be that hard to plug a few characters you ought to like into a plot you’ve seen a thousand times before and come out with an entertaining movie at the other end of it but I guess it must be because this film exists as evidence to suggest just how difficult it must be.

The first and most obvious problem D&D:HAT faces is that D&D has, in fact, no plot. It’s just a framework for people to make up their own plots – that’s the whole point. But OK, a lot of the touchstones are familiar – wizards, thieves, dragons, adventure quests, and so forth don’t need an explanation beyond a bit of world-building. But the world-building here – and I’m sorry but we’ll be coming back to this word a lot – sucks. Nothing here seems to cohere with anything else. Sure, Red Wizards exist in the same space as animated corpses or shape-changing Manic Pixie Dream Girls but there’s nothing actually tying them together, beyond the fact that they self-evidently exist within the same film. It’s all just stuff, and virtually all of it has been done better elsewhere, whether it be Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or, frankly, Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Which is not, to be clear, a ding on Sabrina.

Other problems abound. The cast is working hard to make anything on the page actually come together but they can’t manage it. Nobody could. You can almost hear the quiet-desperation whispering of, “Like me!” when watching it. Chris Pine has tried to dial his charm up to 11 but it just makes the flop-sweat all the more obvious. He’s having to work to make his character charming where normally he simply is. As Simon the not-very-good sorcerer, Justice Smith manages the lone good performance in the film and manages to come across as rather appealing and likable in a doofus sort of way. That’s a victory of sorts.

The rest of the Predictable Band of Rogues are unremarkable, as is almost everyone else in the film, except for Hugh Grant who is actively dreadful. Forge Fitzwilliam is meant to be a classic boo-hiss panto villain but Grant is almost completely the wrong person for that kind of role. He simply isn’t a big enough presence to fill that sort of space in the script. What you need is an Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. That’s a shitty movie too but at least Rickman elevated it with ludicrous, attention-seeking scenery-chewing that was memorable. What we get is Grant turning in a performance that is so lazy it leads me to wonder if he had managed to read the script before anyone shouted “action!”. Grant’s performance here is smarmy but it just doesn’t fill the screen or come across as interesting at all – he looks like he’s just in it for the money and can’t be arsed. It’s a pain to have to sit through. An annoying guardian wants to steal an annoying teenage brat. Just let him so we can get on with something else! But no, Kira must be rescued and reconciled with her father because… oh I don’t know. Just because, really.

And so the film plods through a number of set pieces, none of which are especially engaging. The direction is pretty flat and uninspiring, one digital setting having very much the same impact and pacing as any other. The fight sequences are all… fine? None of them are incoherent but none of them manage to elicit much of a thrill either. They’re there, but that’s pretty much all they are. Actually, that’s not a bad summary of the movie itself – “It certainly exists”.

How Many Of These Have You Seen/Played? Well, I’ve never been a D&D gamer so I can’t speak much to how well or otherwise the movie captures the game. Even a non-player like me can pick up stray references to Baulder’s Gate but ultimately the movie should succeed as a movie not just a representation of the game. And it doesn’t. I’m also old enough to remember the hokey 80s D&D cartoon which wasn’t especially great or terrible but which I have no real feelings towards at all.

Would You Recommend It? I would not recommend it! Because it does, in fact, suck! One of the other big failings of the movie is that it clearly wants to have a bit of the screwball comedic energy that a lot of heist movies have – think Oceans 11 or Sexy Beast or something like that. But it just can’t manage to get anywhere near that level of wit or engagement. Jokes, of which there are surprisingly few, tend to land with a thud and much of the comedy comes either from unlikely situations or characters rolling their eyes at said unlikely situations, as if they can’t quite believe they’re expected to take any of this rubbish seriously either. The material often feels like it should come with a manufacturer’s claim – “all comedy passes the threshold by which it can be technically considered amusing.” All of the strain of making that material work falls to the actors but nobody could make such limp gags and flaccid comedy land. There are odd bits that are mildly amusing like the corpses being brought back to life to give Our Heroes some vital information but they keep getting the wrong one, but “mildly amusing” is the best the film ever gets.

It’s also too long. Yes, yes, a common complaint of modern films but this film just feels flabby. Because so many of the action sequences are completely unremarkable and often seem interchangeable, it feels in the end like there are simply too many of them. Plodding from one mediocre fight scene to get another piece of information about a quest nobody really care about just feels dull after a while and nothing about this movie screams a need for it to be two and a quarter hours long. At least if it were one hour and three-quarters it might feel like it moved at a clip but this is just sludgy.

And that’s pretty much all there is to say about an unfunny, rather charmless movie that ought to have been an easy win for everyone involved yet isn’t. Maybe the script got mangled in the writing process and there was a shorter, better, funnier version than what made it to the screen. If you squint hard enough, you can very nearly, kind of, almost see it poking through at times. But it’s not what we get. What we get is just an exercise in dull franchise-making. I can’t even be bothered to make a, “let’s hope they don’t roll the dice on this lot again”-type pun. The movie didn’t bother to make that much effort so I don’t see why I should.

Scores On The Doors? 4/10 Generosity, thy name is JG