"Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

When we stopped going to movie theaters 37 months ago, I said I was done writing this blog. Movies had moved to streaming, exhibitors had given up, and even studios — you know, the places that make movies — had given up. It was a dark time all around. For the last year or so, the movies have been back at something like half-speed, though there have been weeks at a time when our personal moviegoing (my husband and me, not the Royal We) has been back more or less to normal: Once, occasionally twice, a week. But the blog stayed dormant. There were some wonderful films in 2022, and I'd argue it was one of the better years for movies as a whole, but as streaming services seemed determined to kill movie theaters, and movie exhibitors seemed all too willing to oblige, a blog about going to the movies still seemed pointless.

Now comes Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a movie with a title that sounds made up by corporate committee — no doubt I'm missing a ® or ™ symbol here or there. Going in, everything about D&D HAT seems calculated to fully prove the notion that movies are dead, that there is no imagination left, and that we might as well, 100 or so after modern cinema began, start giving up.

There’s a lot of trepidation going in. Still, go in. Because it turns out all those fears, while no doubt well founded, are, in this case at least, wrong. 

To be clear, Dungeons isn't the sole shining beacon that proves we are out of the moviegoing woods. Starting with that title, ending with a smash-crash-bash-em-up finale that is as poorly choreographed,  narratively murky and cinematically exhausting as any Marvel film, there are flaws.

But oh, there are such wonders.

Here is a film that revels in being a film. Though CG is evident throughout, sometimes abundantly, the first thing you may notice about D&D HAT is that it's gloriously, giddily physical. The people, the creatures, the castles (at least once we're inside the walls), the dungeons, the villages, the swords, the costumes are all delightfully tactile, which goes an awfully long way toward taking viewers into the world of the film.

It's a fanciful world, at the intersection of fairy tale and sword-and-sorcery adventure. Populating it are characters who are visually inhuman but recognizably human after all. They're all on a high-stakes, emotionally rich story redolent of Star Wars by way of The Wizard of Oz, but without the pretense of, say, Ridley Scott's Legend or the tacky silliness of The Beastmaster. It doesn't try too hard like Boorman's Excalibur nor become an outright comedy show like the Jumanji remake, a movie it sometimes resembles.

I've not mentioned the plot, because it's one best discovered fresh — ideally by the most cynical eyes possible, ones that are drooping and tired from imagining this going so very, very wrong, of becoming some new version of Transformers films. The less you believe Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves could be engaging, merry, grand, silly and still have an emotional, beating heart at its core, the more you'll resist it, the more you’ll share the perspective it brings to the proceedings, one that almost feels subverting. 

You don't have to know a single thing about Dungeons & Dragons the role-playing game to watch and be made happy by this irresistible film. It might even be best if you're the kind who scoffs at the game. If you are, then you, like me, will sit in front of this film, arms crossed, daring it to impress you, which it will do — and then, I hope, it will do the same thing to you that it did to me:

It will make you believe that movies can be fun again, that they can be (somewhat) original, truly surprising, and a pure delight from start to finish. As much as I liked the movies in 2022, it's been a long time since a film even hinted at the reasons I still love "the movies."

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves did more than hint: It contains them all, and then some. It's the kind of film that makes you want to go see movies more and more often. It's a pure, unalloyed delight.

April 1, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

1915 js