Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez in a scene from ‘Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ | photo credit: Paramount Pictures
What a pleasure to break out of the theme park of a film that doesn’t set too many expectations and yet delivers more bang for the buck. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves You have everything you expect; Dark dungeons, creepy crawlies, magnificent castles, evil wizards, friends banding together, families fighting for each other, betrayal, close-call adventures, perfectly laid plans gone awry, a lot All the lore and magic… magic.
Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who also wrote the film with Michael Gilio, bring it all together to take us on a feel-good journey. Like the famous role-playing game, it follows one event after another, like one ride after another, with lots of good comedy and enticing color on a template screenplay done to perfection.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (English)
director: John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
mold: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Daisy Head, Rege-Jean Page
Order: 134 minutes
Story: A team of four embarks on a dangerous journey to find a magical helmet and reach the castle of Neverwinter to save a little girl and stop an evil wizard from wreaking havoc.
The characters come across as colourful, initially seeming like cut-outs from the fantasy movie template. We begin inside a dungeon, where a former member of the Harpers, Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine), turned alcoholic after the death of his wife, and his friend Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), an exile from her clan, has been imprisoned. As they stand trial, we look back at how the two, along with their friends, the conman Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) and the petty magician Simon Oumar (Justice Smith), were a band of thieves. During a mission to steal the Resurrection Pill (to revive Ajin’s wife), a red sorceress named Sophina (Daisy Head) double-crosses them, leading to their arrest.
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When Edgin and Holga escape prison and find the forge, he becomes Lord of Neverwinter and a figurehead guardian to Edgin and his late wife’s daughter, Kira. We feel that Forge was the mastermind behind whatever went wrong. Edgin, Holga and Simon, along with an irritable druid Doric (Sophia Lillis; easily one of the best characters) now fight the Forge, Sophina, their armies and whatever monsters grace their way to stop Sophina. must find a magical helmet. evil plans and to save Kiara. Along the way, they also receive help from a Paladin warrior, Zenk Yander (Rege-Gene Page).
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Is a movie you’ve seen dozens of times. A father fights for the daughter he mistakenly believes has abandoned him. A one-note villain who you know will make a fool of himself, despondent in the face of pure evil. A boy wizard with low self-esteem needs to self-actualize and find himself to save the world. Michelle Rodriguez looks on angrily and throws a punch. You know all this. Still, it gives you the satisfaction of taking you where you want to go—but with a little extra—like that extra bar of candy you get from your grandma.
That familiarity and predictability doesn’t get in the way. There are a lot of gorgeous looking action sequences, placed at regular intervals to keep us hooked. A chase sequence involving Doric and the mighty Red Wizard shape-shifting through a dense city is easily one of the most memorable scenes; So this is a sequence in which the team fights an overweight dragon in a dungeon.
Everything ends with a coat of serious humor and that includes the way the minor characters are written. For example, Xenk plays an important role in the mission, but he is also a role model who mocks many other well-mannered men who always walk in a straight line. Even Bradley Cooper’s cameo, as a younger human and Holga’s ex-boyfriend, is puzzling. But, it is Chris Pine who deserves the most praise for his superb comic timing, jolly presence and charm. A scene set in a graveyard, where Edgin and the team have to magically dig open corpses and ask them questions, is the climax of it all.
The film manages to strike the right chord even with the fact that these four lead characters are primarily outsiders, or as Edgin puts it, ‘failures’ who only fail when they come to terms with a defeat. Let’s do it – a very important message for all D&D nerds and kids who watch the movie (it’s kid-friendly; people get killed, burned, and stabbed to death but hardly any blood- spoils). How many times has that statement been reproduced on screen, but what is so special about it? Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is that this isn’t a trailblazing fantasy film concept; It’s plain old dust-to-dust theme park ride that works like magic when written and executed with conviction.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is currently in theaters