REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Mild Spoilers)

Promotional photo featuring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, and Regé-Jean Page. Image: Paramount Pictures.

Chris Pine (with teeth far too white and straight for this movie) leads the cast of 2023's latest fantasy adventure as Edgin, a former do-gooder who turned to a life of petty crime after the death of his wife. Pine is charming without being smarmy and a leader without seemingly being good at anything. Persuasion is his weapon of choice, unlike his companion Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a warrior whose own weapon of choice alternates between potatoes and a deadly, half-melted axe.

At the start of the film, Edgin and Holga are imprisoned in an icy tower for a heist gone wrong, leaving Edgin's beloved daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) in the clutches of conman Forge (Hugh Grant) who is both charming and smarmy. When Forge refuses to let Kira go, Edgin and Holga embark on a mission to bring Forge and his creepy wizard "advisor" Sofina (Daisey Head) down, picking up a subpar sorcerer named Simon (Justice Smith) and a shape-shifting, human-hating Druid named Doric (Sophia Lillis) along the way.

From the promotional material, I had anticipated Regé-Jean Page's character—a Paladin named Xenk—to have a larger role. Still, Page packs a punch with the material he's given, embodying the killjoy "practically perfect in every way" hero with a deadpan-type gravitas. I certainly caught a whiff of Cary Elwes a la Westley from The Princess Bride in his delivery and left both wishing he'd had more screen time while also slightly afraid that any more of his dialogue would completely overdo it.

Overall, this film was a whole lot of fun. I laughed a lot and was invested in the adventure. The star appeal of Pine, Grant, Rodriguez, and Page is likely to draw a lot of people who have never played the namesake game, and I imagine it likely that several leave the theater (or wherever they end up streaming) with an interest in changing that. The jokes landed mostly without the generic blockbuster cadence we audience members have become accustomed to, making it feel like a refreshing change of pace to a lot of contemporary action movies. Writer-director duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have crafted a deeply relatable atmosphere inside a fantastical setting. It's easy to imagine the dialogue coming from the mouths of a group of friends sitting around a table playing as these characters.

As someone who has never played a game of D&D, although not for lack of interest, I was somewhat aware of the plot mechanisms whirling away below the surface. The storyline is clearly broken into several episodes, each leading into the next one—much like an actual D&D game. The characters go to X location and speak with Y person who tells them they need Z item, and so on and so forth. In addition to the standard D&D plot structure, the film seemed to take on the standard Wizard of Oz character development, wherein every character receives one pivotal revelation in the final quarter that completes their self-actualization.

Movie poster for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Image: Paramount Pictures.

Edgin learns to let go of the past in order to be present for his daughter. Holga accepts that Edgin & Co are her new tribe (and finds another short king to romance). Kira forgives her father and begins to trust him again. Simon learns to believe in himself and his magic. Doric warms to humans after her own human parents abandoned her and manages to save her beloved Emerald Enclave. And good old Forge (. . .a conman with a hot air balloon. . .?) learns that blaming everything on his mother gets him nowhere and that there really is ~nothing~ behind that curtain.

There were, admittedly, some cheesy parts to this movie—specifically with the character design for some non-human creatures. A now-beloved side character Jarnathan, a giant black bird, and a notable cat-humanoid child looked particularly puppet-esque. It was jarring in a movie with a lot of digital effects to see two featured characters looking so animatronic, but at the same time, reminded me of cheesy, well-loved '80s adventure and fantasy movies. I think I would have liked it more if all special effects looked consistently on the same level, but it ended up not impacting my experience beyond a few moments here and there.

My largest critique of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is that it falls headfirst into the dead wife trope, where the wife of the main character exists purely to die in order to propel the plot along. There's a hefty amount of "dead wife footage," flashbacks of the wife and Pine's character laughing under the sheets of their bed and sharing a sweet moment over their dinner, laden with close-ups of the wife's serene face. The wife has no established personality, yet is idealized by Edgin. In one particularly overdrawn scene, she opens a window to let a blue dragonfly free chiding Edgin on his foolish and unsuccessful plan to capture the bug when "sometimes you just need to let things go." The blue dragonfly then becomes a motif throughout the film symbolizing Edgin's changing ability to follow through with letting things (namely, her) go. I half-expected the blue dragonfly to morph into some ghostly spirit of the wife and absolve Edgin of any guilt for his many misdeeds since her death, but alas (or maybe huzzah!) it was simply a heavy-handed use of imagery.

Kira's character was also a little lacking in personality. Her main quality is the ability to disappear through the use of a magic necklace when Edgin and Holga are thieving, and that's true in terms of her overall function within the movie too. She's there and then she's not, and it doesn't really make much difference to the construction of the action either way. In times where she could sneak around, as she tells us early on she does frequently, to try to gather information or have a thought that wasn't planted by either Forge or Edgin, she's notably absent. It's a missed opportunity, in my opinion, since the villain is revealed so early on. Rather than keeping her blissfully ignorant of anything going on around her, Daley and Goldstein could have upped the tension by having Kira begin to suspect everything is not what it seems and putting herself in more immediate danger.

Holga's character was a mixed bag. On the one hand, she's a dynamic example of femininity being a strong, capable warrior with a deeply romantic side. The writers don't pigeonhole her into one category, and while she's certainly attractive, she's never sexualized by the camera or story. However, she often played the typical Barbarian saying short, obvious one-liners. I could never get a read on whether the character of Holga was intentionally playing into the joke or if that was just her, which ended up feeling like the script just couldn't make up its mind on whether Holga was truly a Dumb Barbarian.

Performance-wise, I think this main cast was close to perfect. I loved Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis, and hope if there's a sequel that these two come back. I would believe that the character of Forge was written specifically for Hugh Grant, who made this absolute caricature of a villain come across as human and believable. Michelle Rodriguez does the same with Holga, managing to present as lethal and motherly all in one go. Chris Pine is without a doubt the heart and soul of this movie. You can't help but root for him, even when he fails over and over and over again.

The end credits are particularly stunning, accompanied by a great original song "Wings of Time" performed by Tame Impala. There's a small post-credit scene, but the credits themselves are worth sticking around for and watching as they cleverly incorporate illustrations of characters and action from the movie in an illuminated manuscript style.

All in all, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a delight to sit and watch. Is it a Nat. 20? Maybe not, but it's certainly a Nat. 18.

4 stars out of 5.

End Credits: 5/5

Soundtrack: 4.5/5