Review

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: roll for initiative, baby!

29-3-2023

Translation: Patrik Stainbrook

Who’d have thought it? Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a wonderfully wacky adventure packed with plenty of laughs. It doesn’t even require previous knowledge of the game to be enjoyed. My adventuring cap off to them!

First off: my review contains no spoilers. Any information stated here is featured in trailers that have already been released.

I may be way too early in saying it. I’ll do it anyway. With my head held high and a booming voice. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happily declaring Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves the breakout hit of the year – in March!

I never would’ve bet on that. Not after I saw the first trailers for the film. I mean come one. Gaudy rock music, flat jokes, an apparent overdose of what can barely be called special effects – how is this sham supposed to turn into something that even begins to do justice to the mother of all role-playing games? We’re talking about Dungeons and Dragons here, for God’s sake!

And yet here I am, typing these words, struggling to get a big fat grin off my face. Why? Read on.

The plot

Sometimes it’s Edgin’s (Chris Pine) overblown sense of justice that leads him to steal, and into even bigger trouble. His past heist, for instance – I won’t mention the motives for it, spoilers – landed him and his barbarian sidekick Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) in a maximum security prison. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where it’s always winter and eternal ice keeps the prisoners far from the kingdom, our two heroes languish while planning their escape.

No sooner has this succeeded than Edgin and Holga drum up the old gang again. Their next target: a magical relic considered lost for centuries. But that’s not the real coup. The relic only serves to open the magically locked gates to a vault that holds an even greater treasure. Only it belongs to none other than the evil Forge (Hugh Grant), Prince of Nevermore, the capital of the empire.

Dungeons and Dragons – the big momma of all role-playing games

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a realm called the Midwestern United States – specifically the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin – a group of friends gathered together to forever alter the history of gaming.

Dungeons & Dragons, Player’s Handbook, Preface

When Gary Gygax and his friends invented the pen-and-paper game in 1960, they had no idea they were about to create a global phenomenon. Instead, they were tired of just reading stories about worlds with magic, monsters, and adventures instead of experiencing them for themselves.

Dungeons & Dragons, the game, isn’t set in a world like Middle Earth. It has no fixed towns and villages or familiar characters like Frodo and Gandalf. Dungeons & Dragons, rather, is an almost infinite collection of rules, game mechanics and combat systems. A framework, so to speak, which allows the game master – the Dungeon Master – to create their own worlds. In it, they invite players to create their own characters and go on adventures, called campaigns, all conceived by the Dungeon Master. Their outcome depends on each individual encounter. On player decisions. And a roll of the dice. This way, no one can predict the end of their story. Not even the Dungeon Master themselves.

Voilà: the first role-playing game was born.

Classic pen-and-paper: lovingly painted figurines on a simple chequered map, brought to life by the Dungeon Master’s imagination.
Source: Luca Fontana

Gygax and his friends had no idea that they’d revolutionise the gaming world and create an entire industry. They were the ones who came up with role-playing elements taken for granted today, such as races and their abilities, classes like warriors, rogues and mages, and talent trees. Yes, even skill points to invest, which players receive when they’ve gained enough experience and levelled up. Looting monsters, chests and enemies to get powerful items and pieces of armour that make your character even stronger, all thought up by that small group of buddies.

No matter what role-playing game you play today, there’s a bit of DnD in everything. Accordingly, the legacy of the mother of all role-playing games truly is astounding. Too astounding, I thought, the first trailers fresh in my mind. Thankfully, my opinions have since shifted.

Let’s face it: Dungeons & Dragons is completely absurd – in a good way!

I’m not an expert when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. More of an apprentice. I’ve only been playing in a campaign for just under a year – as a Paladin. Always a Paladin. Since my Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft days, I’ve played a Paladin in every role-playing game. Long story. Fact is, I’m not yet a DnD professional. I can’t really say what exactly Dungeons & Dragons is or has to be in spirit. I can only speak from my own experience with the game. Which is… weird, to say the least. Wacky. And hilarious. Just like the movie.

Suddenly, it all seems so clear.

I’d almost made the huge mistake of taking the legacy of Dungeons and Dragons far too seriously. Nothing would’ve been further from Gygax and his friends’ intentions, even if the marketing often tries to sell DnD as an extremely serious high-fantasy adventure. Gygax’s goal, in fact, was to bring friends together. By having fun. Creating unforgettable memories. It’s exactly what happens to me and my party during our campaign. We laugh. We joke. Our Dungeon Master tries to baffle us. We come up with the most absurd and far too complicated solutions. We laugh again. The Dungeon Master shakes his head, but can’t help grinning. Hours pass in what feels like minutes. Inside jokes are born. Anecdotes for later are created. And at the end of the day, my cheeks are sore from laughing so much.

When I think about past attempts to adapt pen-and-paper for the big screen, I realise why most of them failed: they took themselves too seriously. Much too seriously. Take Dungeons & Dragons from the year 2000 with iconic actor Jeremy Irons. Or Krull from 1983 with Liam Neeson. Or Mazes and Monsters with Tom Hanks a year before that. They all tried to be the most epic story ever told. The latter even tried to be a horror spin-off. They all forgot that the typical Saturday afternoon DnD session is often a fine balance between exciting and ridiculous.

A crowd-pleaser that actually pleases

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is fun without a doubt. There are no half measures. Again and again, I get to belly laughing – so much for flat, dumb humour.

It all comes down to perfect casting. Take Chris Pine, the eloquent bard who specialises in making plans that go awry, yet still manages to motivate his party time and time again. Or Michelle Rodriguez’s Holga, a barbarian who’s silent and hard to tame, yet possesses a heartfelt humanity that always shines through. Also superb is Hugh Grant as the nasty prince sporting a slimy British accent. It’s rare, finding such a nasty piece of work you simultaneously hate and love.

Still, one party member steals the show. Bridgerton beau Regé-Jean Page as paladin Xenk Yendar. Holier than the Pope, more sincere than Jesus. He’s constantly surrounded by an impenetrable aura of righteousness that feels almost tangible in the movie theatre – that’s how over-the-top the Paladin is. And he pronounces every syllable with such incredible gravitas that you might think the whole world was hanging on his every word.

Edgin (Chris Pine) and Xenk (Regé-Jean Page) in search of a valuable relic.
Source: Paramount Pictures

John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein not only wrote the screenplay, but also directed the film themselves. And you can really tell the brains behind it know their stuff; it’s palpable in every scene. Again and again they sprinkle in little homages. Take a relic that requires a hero to adapt to it before its true powers are unlocked. In technical jargon, this is called attuning. Or jewellery with spell slots, i.e. stored spells – don’t ask.

But the greatest feat Daley and Goldstein accomplish is in translating typical, outrageous situations that DnD players themselves have experienced dozens of times to the big screen.

For example, I could barely hold back my laughter when Chris Pines’ Edgin told his entire highly dramatic backstory at the beginning of the movie, decorating it like a Christmas tree – yep, we all made up stuff like that during character creation. Or when Paladin Xenk explained an extremely complex puzzle, just for the party warlock to immediately trigger the deadly mechanism at the first opportunity. Been there. Done that. One wrong step and boom, quicksand. Suspicious puddles that you jump into, even though you know better – bang, a countdown is triggered. I could go on and on.

If only Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) and Edgin (Chris Pine) had rolled higher on Perception, this might not have happened.
Source: Paramount Pictures

And then there’s the world. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves doesn’t just look beautiful, it’s varied as well. From large medieval cities to lush green forests and rural farms to gloomy, hellish dungeons, it’s all here. Plus the loving creature design that went into the many masks, prosthetics and costumes. You’ll be surprised how many Dragonborn, Aarakocra and Tabaxi are in the movie – and not a single one of these creatures was created on a computer and cheaply inserted into the movie.

But what I liked best was the graveyard setting in the middle of the film – once the scene of an epic battle, now a mass grave. Our heroines and heroes need to question the dead there for information. The creators wrote this scene with such a morbid sense of humour that I immediately was reminded of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy. Dungeons & Dragons at its finest.

Verdict: funny, heartfelt, delightful – DnD done right!

Hard to believe, I know. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves might actually be one of the best (pen-and-paper) game adaptations out there, even if it’s not half as groundbreaking and cinematic as, say, Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, the fact that fantasy works even when it’s not as serious and epic as Game of Thrones or Chronicles of Narnia is still a badly needed proof of concept.

In addition, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves manages a difficult balancing act. You don’t have to be a hardcore fan of the game to like the movie. This is mainly thanks to the cast – led by Chris Pine – who must’ve had the time of their lives on set. Infectious enthusiasm. The rest is taken care of by the beautifully designed settings, costumes and creatures that make a little over two hours of runtime fly by.

In this sense, I only have one thing to say. Roll for initiative, my dear players, and dive into a world full of dungeons and dragons!

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will be in theatres starting March 30, 2023. Runtime: 134 minutes. Rated PG 12. We’ve also already reviewed the film on our Digitec Podcast (in Swiss German), check it out here!

Cover photo: Paramount Pictures

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Luca Fontana

Senior Editor

Luca.Fontana@digitecgalaxus.ch

I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.

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