In the Flesh: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

There are some lovely practical effects in Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly’s latest in a long line of attempts to translate the beloved tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to the big screen. Some fun performances, too! Genuinely funny jokes. Cool creature design. It doesn’t look like much, helmed as it is by a total amateur and a TV procedural alum, but nor is it totally visually incompetent. The action’s surprisingly clean and intelligible, even. The movie feels kind of like a spirited knock-off of Dragonslayer or one of the other mid-budget fantasy epics of the eighties sword and sorcery boom. It’s similarly unashamed of its roots in Jack Vance’s world of silly monsters and spell-slinging, clipping along without stopping to assume the audience needs every new conceit explained to them at length, and if the script is sometimes a little over-seasoned with quips at least it’s all coming from a single character, the charmingly short-sighted Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine), rather than erupting at random from anyone and everyone.

Pine has a lot of charisma as a leading man, and he’s ably supported by the laconic brutality of Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodrieguez) and the gloomy neuroses of Simon Aumar (Justice Smith) while Sofia Lillis gives a good turn as Tiefling druid Doric, a rather underdeveloped character. Hugh Grant’s Forge Fitzwilliam is a lovely foil to Edgin, amoral and petty but with just enough desire to be a better man to make him slightly disgusting, and his evil wizard colleague’s (Daisy Head) obvious loathing for him is a funny running gag. It’s the film’s humor that carries it through its weakest moments, and even the occasional bomb (the extremely fat dragon is pretty uninspired as a sight gag) can’t dilute the hilarity of, say, Bradley Cooper as a hobbit, or the botched illusion attempt, or the scene in which the characters dig up and interrogate dozens of corpses killed in the same long-ago battle in increasingly humdrum and ridiculous ways. There’s a real craft to that kind of elaborate, world-oriented bit, relying on fantasy conceits and trusting the audience to get them intuitively.

The other standout here is the scene in which Doric escapes Forge’s castle by repeatedly changing form, a tense and intricate sequence in which the film’s so-so CGI does its best work and the sheer kinetic thrill of it covers the shortfall. Watching a deer slide under a closing portcullis like Indiana Jones is just silly enough to work, and even when a set looks a bit like something out of an especially well-made episode of Power Rangers the movie stays loose and fun. Its flashbacks and asides are surprisingly muscular, too, showcasing epic fantasy battles and arcane atrocities that flesh out the world nicely and give a sense of scale to the pleasantly straightforward and low-stakes story. There are even a few moments where the film’s earnestness gets a little tear-jerky, and what does anyone really want out of a blockbuster but thrills, laughs, and a dab of emotional depth? Honor Among Thieves may not break any molds, but it pulls the job off neatly and with flair.