"Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves": review

Left pic (from the bottom, clockwise from 7 o'clock): Chris Pine as bard/thief Edgin Darvis, Regé-Jean Page as paladin Xenk Yandar, Justice Smith as magic user Simon Aumar, Sophia Lillis as druid Doric, Hugh Grant as thief Forge Fitzwilliam, Michelle Rodriguez as barbarian Holga Kilgore.

Right pics: Daisy Head as Red Wizard Sofina, Chloe Coleman as Kira, Ed's daughter.

Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley,* 2023's "Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" was thought by many, especially on the right, to be yet another Hollywood turd-in-the-making, with both directors talking about how they deliberately "emasculated" Chris Pine's character. Then it came out, and my right-leaning go-to critics were gushing about how good the film actually was (my left-leaning go-to critics liked it, too). 

What's interesting about the situation surrounding the film is that moviegoing audiences have gotten gun-shy about attempts at making fantasy films based on a "canon" that don't respect that canon. We've seen how the TV version of "The Witcher" succumbed to the temptation to twist canon, not respecting the original game and novels, eventually driving away star Henry Cavill. Then there was the billion-dollar shit-show that was Amazon's "Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," which will incomprehensibly move forward with a second season despite a thoroughly abysmal first season whose disastrousness neither Amazon nor the show's principal actors will even admit to. So along comes "Dungeons and Dragons," which is based on the popular role-playing game that had its heyday in the 1980s. D&D both does and doesn't have a canon: the game has rules meant to be respected and followed, and the accompanying books help to flesh out a particular (but still flexible) fantasy world. Yet at the same time, the game doesn't care what race you are; in theory at least, any player can fit in as any race and class. Black elf? Why not? Black elf who's been down on his luck and is a thief? Again, why not? A great deal of pluralism is built into the game, which works by having a team of players run through a collectively imagined scenario that is curated by a sort of referee called the Dungeon Master. Players create and develop the characters (roles) they will play, and their actions need to be consistent with their characters' traits—not just in terms of personality types, but in terms of game-specific traits like strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution (toughness), and charisma. These traits are initially determined via rolls of the dice; navigating and surviving a D&D scenario ("campaign") is often as much a matter of luck as of skill. Players come together, then, to perform a mission, and the movie's directors are on record as saying that they strove to reflect that aspect of the game as much as possible: a motley crew assembles, united in purpose, albeit for different personal reasons.

To this end, the directors have noted that a heist scenario, as a cinematic trope, has a lot in common with a D&D campaign, so "Honor Among Thieves" is very much an action-oriented heist comedy. Goldstein and Daley also wanted their film to be a respectful tribute to the game, so the characters don't generally "go meta" and wink at the audience that often as if to mock the game (in his review, however, my buddy Charles notes at least one "meta" moment involving a discussion about the "arbitrary" nature of a spell). When things go wrong for our heroes in the film, they often go wrong in a plausibly D&D way.

The story begins in a prison when a burly, orc-like character is shoved into a cell with our two main heroes, bard-thief Edgin Darvis (Pine) and his barbarian companion Holga Kilgore (Rodriguez). The brute gets fresh with Holga, who kicks his knees backward and slams his head against her stone bench, knocking him out. Later, at what is essentially a parole hearing, Ed makes a convincing case that he is a reformed man. But as the parole board is stamping Ed and Holga's forms with the "parole approved" seal, the two friends grab Jarnathan—an Arakocra (bird-human hybrid) on the parole-review board—smash through a nearby window, and use Jarnathan's powers of flight, quite against his will, to escape from prison. 

Ed has a history: before he became a thief, he used to be a type of spy called a Harper. In that capacity, he helped to put plenty of people in prison, including some of the malevolent Red Wizards of Thay, but because Harpers have to swear a vow of poverty ("expect nothing in return"), Ed was struggling to provide for his family. His wife Zia had faith that the family could eke out a living, but Ed got greedy one day and stole some Red Wizard treasure, unaware that the treasure was marked, allowing the Red Wizards to track the treasure down to Ed's home. The Wizards murdered Zia (Georgia Landers, seen in flashbacks) but didn't find his daughter Kira (Coleman), whom Ed and his friend Holga raised together, inviting her along on thieving escapades when she was old enough and could use her magical invisibility pendant. Then Ed learned from his partner-in-crime Forge (Grant) and the sinister-looking Sofina (Head) about the existence of a Tablet of Reawakening that could bring back the dead, he decided to help with a heist that would involve breaking into a Harper fortress. The heist went wrong, with Sofina using a Time Stop spell that immobilized Ed and Holga but allowed Sofina and Forge to run free. Before succumbing to the spell, Ed managed to toss the Tablet of Reawakening to Forge and made him promise to guard it and to see after Ed's daughter Kira.

Fast-forward to just after Ed and Holga's prison break. They discover that, over the past two years, Forge has become the ruler of the realm of Neverwinter (with the former leader mysteriously indisposed), and Kira is with him. When they visit Forge, they meet Kira and discover she resents her father for having abandoned her. Forge has lied, telling Kira that Ed left her for a "Tablet of Riches," implying that money is more important to Ed than his own daughter. In this way, Forge has cemented Kira's loyalty to him. Ed and Holga also find out that Sofina is a Red Wizard, and she has become Forge's top advisor (in truth, Sofina is the real power ruling over Neverwinter, with Forge the con man being frankly terrified of her). This situation sets up the basic campaign: Ed and Holga need to find some allies who will help them take down the traitorous Forge and grab Kira from his clutches. What they slowly find out, though, is what Sofina's plan is: by allowing Forge to bring back the once-disbanded High Sun Games, Sofina knows that the bulk of Neverwinter's population will be in attendance, making them susceptible to a spell called the Beckoning Death, which turns its victims into zombies—an army of the dead with which to conquer land outside of Thay, where Sofina hails from. Sofina's master, the evil lich Szass Tam (Ian Hanmore, who appears only in a cameo), took over Thay in just this manner. Ed and Holga enlist the help of the inept wizard Simon Aumar (Smith) and the mistrustful, shapeshifting druid Doric (Lillis), who sees humans as compulsive liars and betrayers. Simon is motivated to help the group because of his extreme poverty; Doric wants to take down Forge because he has been systematically executing the people who once took her in while also forcing them to destroy her forest home. The group picks up one more member who can lead them to a crucial magical helmet called the Helm of Disjunction: the inhumanly righteous paladin Xenk Yendar (Page, who played the bad guy in "The Gray Man"). Yendar leads them to an underground system of caves to retrieve the helm. Will the group defeat Forge and Sofina? Will Ed get his daughter back and convince her that he didn't leave her for money? Will all the group members survive to the end?

In all, I thought this was a rollicking adventure—fun if not particularly deep. The tone is mostly comedic along the way, but plenty of scenes show that the movie also wears its heart on its sleeve, especially as we see how characters either begin to bond with each other or show the depth of already existing bonds (Holga's loyalty to Ed is especially touching). Most of the characters have some kind of arc: Ed is encouraged by paladin Xenk to find his Harper mojo again; Holga goes on a side trip in which she has to deal with her separation from Marlamin, the man she loves (a hilarious cameo by Bradley Cooper), and the reason she was kicked out of her clan. Simon, once rejected by Doric, whom he had tried to woo long ago, must find or regain his self-confidence, especially if he is to use the Helm of Disjunction, with which he must attune himself. Xenk and Doric don't seem to change too much over the course of the plot, but Doric's disdain for humans does seem to dissolve a bit as she learns to work as a team member in the attempt to take down Forge and Sofina. The movie pays what is arguably its deepest tribute to D&D by showing how these disparate characters learn to function as a unit, each making use of his or her unique talents to help the group survive to the next challenge.

The movie's atmospherics are a little all over the place, but that too is part and parcel with a D&D campaign, in which various myths and legends are stitched together in a wildly pastiched way that isn't consistent with any one mythology or tradition. The mood is helped along by the musical soundtrack's heavy use of Uilleann pipes, giving the movie a mythically Irish faerie feel, even though the constantly varying terrain (including an impressive lava flow) is more reminiscent of the crazy-quilt landscape in fantasy movies like "Conan the Barbarian," in which characters seem to teleport from flat deserts to mountain forests in an instant. The prison shown in the opening sequence features an upward pan of the camera to reveal a central tower and various bridges radiating like spokes to the outer wall—very much reminding me of the city of Zion from "The Matrix Reloaded." The world of the movie is full of CGI and practical-effects creatures, giving the environment a decidedly Star Wars vibe. Hats off to the filmmakers for pulling so many recognizable creatures out from the game's various beast-related tomes, most of which I can no longer name. The beasts, I mean, not the tomes.

I noticed that, while the D&D term "magic user" is never uttered in the film, the Harry Potter adjective "wizarding" is mentioned by one character. Other evocative terms make an appearance, but I don't know whether these terms were used on purpose or not. Specifically, the term "wild magic" is spoken by Simon at one point. For readers of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson, the term wild magic is key to understanding Donaldson's fantasy world as it is the crux on which the alternate universe's Creator has built that universe. But Simon merely mentions wild magic in an offhand way, so the term obviously doesn't mean what it means in Donaldson's fantasy world.

A few aspects of the movie were somewhat amusing. It look me a few minutes, but I finally recognized Sophia Lillis, the actress playing Doric: she played the young Beverly in "It." Lillis has big, hypnotic eyes, and she looks uncannily like a girl I knew from church years ago (although that girl was brown-haired). Another amusing thing was the Sending Stones—this movie's version of walkie-talkies, right down to the screeching feedback, a property that Doric discovers accidentally. The movie included other tributes to modern technology as well, such as when an illusion of Ed that is cast by Simon as a distraction starts to glitch in a way that modern users of tech will recognize, with Ed's facsimile seizing up during a song and singing syllables over and over while Ed's image begins to morph into a comically horrifying travesty of the real Ed. The clever use of portal magic also led to some hilarious moments as the final heist was under way, with near-disasters under a horse-drawn carriage and the problem of what to do when the destination end of the portal "wormhole" terminates in a stone floor.

Maybe we should spend a paragraph talking about things like girl-bosses, Mary Sues, and Gary Stus. I didn't end up thinking that any female character qualified as a Mary Sue: each one had to "make her bones," so to speak—to earn her right to be part of the team. Doric, as a shapeshifter relying on druidic nature-magic, only barely managed to get out of several scrapes early on in the story. She was also dealing with a deep distrust of humans that, while not exactly crippling, did at least potentially hamper her ability to meld with the rest of the team. Holga fought with a great deal of skill, but she took her hits and had her weaknesses, including her unresolved issues with Marlamin. Even the powerful, evil Sofina, who seemed like the best candidate for the girl-boss title, had her flaws. Far from fulfilling her own ambitions, she'd been tasked with fulfilling her master Szass Tam's ambitions. And while the movie only hinted at this, one got the impression that Sofina had become a Red Wizard after great personal sacrifice (actress Daisy Head said she developed Sofina's back story, which included reasons for her having lost her soul to Szass Tam). If anyone was a Gary Stu, it was the paladin Xenk Yendar, who was deliberately written to be saintly, proficient at fighting, and perfect all around, except for a certain Spock-like naïveté and literalness that made him a terrible conversationalist. Such a perfect and comically flat character couldn't be shown on screen for too long, and in fact, Xenk parted ways with the group before the end, only to show up again in the film's final minutes.

The film's actors all do a great job and seem to have had a lot of fun making the movie. Chris Pine isn't quite the bard as that guy from "The Witcher" (who sings that "Pass a Coin to Your Witcher" song that became a pop-culture earworm), but he's convincing as a flawed father who is trying, almost in spite of himself, to gather up his old Harper idealism and be a true hero to his daughter. Michelle Rodriguez is terrific as Holga the barbarian, radiating strength, courage, competence, and armpit hair. Holga's sisterly loyalty to Ed and motherly loyalty to Kira are what hold the film together. Actor Justice Smith is new to me; I understand he was the character who screams like a woman in one or two of the Jurassic World movies; his British accent is surprisingly good for an American, or so I thought (you British readers will have to confirm for me). Smith's comic delivery—Simon is the main source of comic relief—is on point as well. We sympathize with how Simon longs to be with Doric, and there's some fulfillment in watching as he gains in strength and confidence, eventually earning Doric's approval, even cracking to her, "Quite a second date, yeah?" at one point as they're navigating a maze. Doric's look in response to this question shows subtle amusement, and for once, she doesn't rebuff him. Sophia Lillis's Doric has a somewhat unearthly way about her; Lillis infuses Doric with a weird sort of left-field charm. I wonder whether Regé-Jean Page, as the noble paladin Xenk Yandar, had the most fun of all the cast in a role that was deliberately designed to be almost a self-parody. Still, Xenk plays a crucial role in bringing Ed back to a more idealistic version of himself, so it's not as though Xenk is a mere plot device. Hugh Grant, who reigned supreme with a charming stammer in 90s-era romantic comedies and dramas as a much younger man, has chosen quirkier roles over the years, many of them involving smarmy characters. In that spirit, his Forge Fitzwilliam is appropriately disgusting and probably irredeemable. In an interview, actress Daisy Head, who plays the Red Wizard Sofina, laughingly notes that she's capable of staring without blinking for long periods—a skill she used in her scenes in this film. Fellow star Chloe Coleman, who plays daughter Kira, was awed by how Head was able to get through entire scenes without blinking once. Even Michelle Rodriguez commented that she tried several times to get into staring matches with Head, and Head won every time. After watching this movie, I went to IMDb.com and looked up Chloe Coleman, who is an impressive and versatile child actress. Kira doesn't have a large part in the film, but her role is important, and she gets enough screen time for her character to be fleshed out with some depth, allowing us to appreciate the stakes for Ed.

"Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" contains plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle references to other movies. After watching paladin Xenk expertly dispatch several enemies by himself, Holga mutters, "I'm glad he's on our side," which at least felt like a "Star Trek III" reference (McCoy says it about Uhura, but he of course uses the pronoun she). When our intrepid questers encounter a disgustingly fat dragon named Themberchaud in the subterranean caves of the Underdark while searching for the Helm of Disjunction, I was immediately reminded of the ridiculously obese dragon from the first "How to Train Your Dragon." There's a scene in which some dead warriors are brought temporarily back to life by a spell, which evoked a similar situation in Guillermo del Toro's first "Hellboy" movie. When we see the evil lich Szass Tam, he's noseless, which is standard for liches but still felt like a Voldemort reference from the Harry Potter universe. When Xenk fights a group of undead warriors, his sword lights up with magical energy, as does the sword of the undead group's leader, thus evoking lightsabers (but you could argue that flaming swords are an ancient concept long predating lightsabers). In the caves with Themberchaud, Simon helps Doric when she's hanging from a ledge, and he pulls her to safety just before Themberchaud can leap up and snap his jaws on Doric's legs—an overt reference to the exact same tableau in 1993's "Jurassic Park," in which Lex is almost gobbled by a velociraptor. Lastly—and I need to be vague about this—there's a scene in which Doric changes into a gigantic owlbear and gives an enemy the Hulk-on-Loki treatment from the first Avengers movie. It's not surprising when a movie is filled with intertextuality, but this one was brimming with references to other films.

I'm left with only one question that gnaws at me: when our heroes are in that maze near the end, why not contrive a way to run across the top of it? When Ed was giving one of his pep talks to Simon, he mentioned a time when Simon "couldn't spider-climb" until someone sicced a dog on him. So spider-climbing is apparently a skill, and it might have been useful in the maze situation since the maze's walls didn't seem to be more than twenty feet high.

One of the great pitfalls in every story that involves magic is that the rules for that magic risk not making sense. If you leave the cinema asking yourself, "Well, why didn't they just use Trick X to perform Task Y?"—then the magic didn't make sense, and that took you out of the movie. Luckily, the magic in D&D comes with rules, and there are moments in the film during which the properties of certain spells and magic items are laid out to allow us to follow the action better. The Hither-Thither Staff is a good example of this: Holga got the staff from Marlamin's residence, thinking it was only a bejeweled walking stick. Simon sees the staff and immediately understands that it's a portal device that works by certain rules: it has a range of about 500 yards (later on, he says "a quarter mile," which is close to 500 yards), and it only works with a destination you can see. With D&D's rules informing the magic seen in the movie, there's a lot more self-consistency than can be found in, say, the Harry Potter universe or the universes shown in other magic-themed movies.

For a film so filled with myth and magic, you'd think the story would be pregnant with metaphors and symbolism. But for me, there was only one symbol that truly stood out: the recurrent image of a blue dragonfly. In a dream sequence, Ed remembers back to when he and his wife Zia are cowering under the bedsheets after a blue dragonfly has flown into their home. Neither is eager to deal with the problem, but after Zia teasingly shames Ed into getting out of bed first, they both attempt to get rid of the insect. Ed tries to capture it with a bowl, perhaps thinking he can then toss it out of the house, but the thing evades his flailing attempts at trapping it. Zia tells Ed to stop trying to catch it and to just let it go. She opens a window, and the dragonfly departs, liberated. Thus does the blue dragonfly become a symbol for letting go, a moral lesson waiting for Ed to understand it as he grapples with wanting to bring his wife back from the dead. Xenk the paladin warns Ed at one point that his wife is probably in a better place now, so bringing her back (Xenk uses the verbal form dragging) to this world could have negative consequences. Ed finds himself doubting whether he should use the Tablet of Reawakening for his intended purpose, which has a bearing on how the movie ends.

Despite being a lighthearted movie, "Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" traffics in some rather deep themes. As with a lot of American films, one big theme is how disparate people can come together as a family. (Nontraditional families are a recurrent motif in American cinema.) Related to this are, as mentioned above, notions of loyalty. Self-sacrifice for a greater purpose shows up as well. There is a vaguely Tolkienian struggle between good and evil vibe, but with this being a comedy, that theme isn't given quite the darkly serious resonance it's given in, say, the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. A briefly touched-upon theme, which could have been developed further, has to do with the ruin of the earth through heedless development of property. Simon's character brings us the theme of the importance of self-confidence—not merely to snag the chicks, but also to grow into the fullest person one can be. People apparently approached this movie with some trepidation, so it doubtless came as a welcome surprise to discover that "Dungeons and Dragons" might not be the deepest movie ever, but it's got at least half a brain and a great deal of heart. Imagine that: a movie that's funny and at least a little profound.

In creating my notes for this review, I ended up watching the movie twice, which indicates how much I liked it. I have a mile-high collection of movies on my computer and in the Cloud at this point, only a small percentage of which I ever bother to watch multiple times. "Dungeons and Dragons" probably won't win any awards, and I agree with a few critics' complaints that some of the special effects look a bit half-assed, but overall, the story was thoroughly entertaining, and I ended up rooting for the good guys. If you're looking for a feel-good adventure with generally bloodless swordplay (there's one very neat and clean beheading that we see from a distance), this is your film.

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*Trivia: John Francis Daley has done his share of acting. I remember him best as the eternally frustrated Mitch in the 2005 movie "Waiting...," constantly interrupted by loudmouth Monty (Ryan Reynolds). Mitch finally blows up at the end and gives an entire crowd at a gathering "the goat," an obscene gesture in which you drop your pants, face away from your intended victims, and expose your anus and genitals in the ultimate fuck-you. This could be related to goatse, which I encourage you not to look up.