Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
The role-playing game from Hasbro is given a fresh cinematic outing in a rollicking, diverting escapade with imagination to spare.
Game for a laugh: Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith and Michelle Rodriguez
There’s a dungeon, a morbidly obese dragon and a lot more besides. The title is merely a jumping off point, designed to introduce fresh audiences to the world of the Hasbro role-playing game – and to lure in fans of the same. As tabletop game adaptations go, it is one of the more successful, largely because of the ratio of good jokes, diverting dialogue and an awesome visual panache. Where impressive production design leads many a fantasy adventure by the nose, this film’s pictorial splendour adds considerable sinew to a lark that appears not to give a damn.
The insouciance of the lute-playing thief Edgin (Chris Pine) sets the tone, recalling a similar irreverent, knockabout attitude to fairy-tale fiction as fashioned by Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride. Here, anything is game just so long as the entire package continues to amuse, enthral and entertain, which it largely does. When we meet Edgin and his best mate Holga (a martially skilled Michelle Rodriguez) they are in the titular dungeon, with Edgin knitting a pair of mittens and Holga indulging her passion for potatoes. Edgin has served two years in prison for “grand larceny and skulduggery” – theft – although, as he sees it, his real crime is “robbing his daughter of her father.” The latter, Kira (Chloe Coleman), has already had her mother killed by wizards and in the interim has been adopted by the unscrupulous Lord of Neverwinter (Hugh Grant), who has the morals of a rat. Edgin counts the days when he and Kira will be reunited and he will do whatever it takes to pick her up in his arms again…
The first, critically reviled Dungeons & Dragons (2000) was condemned for its black stereotyping in respect of Marlon Wayans’ character. No such censure can be levelled at the new film, particularly as the true hero is a Latino woman (Rodriguez) and the villain played by a middle-aged white actor who went to Oxford. Hugh Grant is an interesting choice as the reprehensible Neverwinter, knowing too well that the bad guy invariably bags the juiciest moments, which he squeezes with oily relish. And his henchman is no less a force of iniquity, being a bald, unsmiling sorceress with unimaginable powers. The film’s ingenuity is never in doubt, but it really comes into its own in the final act when Neverwinter mounts a gladiatorial game involving a giant shape-shifting maze, ferocious mythical beasts and life-sapping gelatine cubes.
All this is rendered with enormous élan and for the most part with deadpan delivery (Mr Grant excepted). Chris Pine appears to be in his element, and even gets to sing a couple of ballads, while Regé-Jean Page as a reluctant collaborator is as straight-faced as a plank, slipping out his lines with Shakespearean aplomb (“I do not traffic in colloquialisms”). It’s all enormous fun, if more chucklesome than genuinely hilarious, and more imaginative than one could possibly have hoped for.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head, Hayley-Marie Axe, Nicholas Blane, Sarah Amankwah, Bradley Cooper.
Dir Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, Pro Jeremy Latcham, Brian Goldner and Nick Meyer, Screenplay Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio, Ph Barry Peterson, Pro Des Raymond Chan, Ed Dan Lebental, Music Lorne Balfe, Costumes Amanda Monk, Sound Chris Diebold, Dialect coach Brendan Gunn.
Paramount Pictures/ Entertainment One-Entertainment One.
133 mins. USA/UK/Australia/Canada/Iceland. 2023. US Rel: 19 March 2023. UK Rel: 31 March 2023. Cert. 12A.
