Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Review
You’ll want to roll the dice on this one. A rollicking good time, that - against all odds - is very funny and a lot of fun.
Charming thief Edgin (Chris Pine) and his sidekick Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) bust out of prison, where they have been kept after a theft gone wrong. Edgin wants to resume his life with daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman), but when he discovers that former friend Forge (Hugh Grant) has partnered with a red witch Sofina (Daisy Head), and is keeping his daughter hostage, he must team up with partners old and new - including average sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), human hating Doric (Sophia Lillis), and complete badass Xenk (Rege-Jean Page) - to get his daughter back and stop an evil plan.
If you said, based on the looks of the trailer or the poster, that you were going into this movie thinking it would be anything other than an unmitigated, multi-million dollar losing disaster, I’d call you a liar. To your face. There’s no way on Earth anyone could have figured this would be a winner.
But a winner it is.
Dungeons and Dragons, defying absolutely all odds, is absolutely hilarious, a tonne of fun, and simultaneously both winningly nostalgic, and fresh and new.
Let’s start with the story. The film is giving us the exact same vibes as any other sort of mythic, adventure, fantasy quest film. And it knows it’s doing it. The difference is that it is self-aware and nodding in the moments you don’t expect it to be, and treats the elements that you’d expect a modern, winningly self-aware fantasy film to lambast in complete earnest. It’s a heady mix, but one that makes the film both completely charmant, and fantastically funny, in equal measure.
Across the board, the cast is uniformly fantastic. Particular standouts are Chris Pine, who anchors this with the sort of straight man humor that we’ve seen in a few of his roles, and Hugh Grant, who will have you in stitches. Michelle Rodriguez is both fierce and funny, in a sort of Drax-esque role, and her cameo husband is startling and fantastic. Rege-Jean Page is also quite a hit.
Often the villains in these films blur together, and while the actual villain here certainly isn’t going to make an Top 10 lists in the future, it won’t be due to the performance. Daisy Head gives Sofina a really incredible go, and makes for an - at times - truly terrifying villain. It’s a performance that has to be praised, and completely fits the vibe of the film, elevating it beyond anything it has reason to achieve.
As you might expect from a fantasy piece like this, the visuals are a lot of fun. The creative team has fun with a bunch of different landscapes from the film - whether its underground caverns (accessed through ‘orifices’), Lord of the Rings-esque hillsides, AOE Turtle Ship style boats, or wind stricken, rocky prisons.
Ultimately, what Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves understands is that a movie like this has to be fun and funny, but in order to be so it also has to wear its heart on its sleeve, offer up some world building, and be completely earnest in its tackling of its ridiculous story. Thankfully, we can safely say they have delivered.
