Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
“What is it, exactly, that you bring to this?”
‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is one of the most ubiquitous names in all of entertainment. Up there with things like ‘Star Wars’, ‘Nintendo’, ‘Chess’, and ‘Monopoly’; you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s never heard of “DnD”. It’s a world of infinite adventure, fantasy, danger, excitement, fear, and triumph. You can be anyone, tell any story, vanquish any evil, slay any dragon. The myriad worlds of DnD hold an infinitesimal number of fates and an equally impossible number of stories… So, how have Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, and Michael Gilio managed to create something so forgettable, thematically regressive, and disingenuous?
In Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves we follow Edgin as he seeks redemption for his slain wife and estranged daughter. Things go awry, the situation gets predictably messy, and things progress almost exactly how you think they would to stretch that plot over almost two-and-a-half hours of film. It’s a weird ride that begins with some very old-fashioned and icky humor, moves into slapstick comedy, turns into high fantasy-adventure with sudden jump scares, fat shames, has truly excellent action scenes and a heist that feels entirely out of place because it’s so well written, and wraps itself up into a package designed for [and possibly by] 15-year olds so they can laugh when the characters say “the S word” at conveniently funny moments. Just imagine a film where Chris Pine does his best Jason Bateman impression for over 2-hours… There’s always comedy in the Hasbro stand… Right?
Somehow, at almost 140-minutes long, I can’t think of a single film I’ve seen in the last several years that feels more rushed. I was having flashbacks of Rogue 1 as the first act quietly screamed, “I’m obligatory!” before I was suddenly slammed into the second, and then loathingly realized there were still 40-minutes left as the third began. Honor Among Thieves is a film that should have either been a show – allowing it to actually flesh out any of its ideas, characters, or places rather than just name-dropping the “Hot 100 DnD Things Players Will Know” – or should have been severely cut-down into a 90-minute adventure with just the action and heists. Somehow, like the world’s worst roller coaster, it manages to be both entirely too long and entirely too hurried. The film is essentially just the meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing, and what he’s pointing at is a glossary of DnD terms.
Dungeons & Dragons is one of the most near and dear things to my heart. I struggle to think of another singular force that helped define who I am, what I like, and how I express myself than the adventures I’ve had, friends I’ve made, stories I’ve told, and lives I’ve touched both playing and running these games. If you have a deep love of DnD, see this when it’s cheap or streaming. While it feels like it was written by someone who read the spark notes of DnD’s wiki page; the actualization of some common DnD creatures and fights onto the big screen [and a certain heist involving a painting] are so good that it nearly justifies its ridiculous runtime and otherwise abysmal writing, acting, and storytelling.
This could have really been something, and it’s too bad it wasn’t.
“Fantastic. Where's the shovel?”
