52-Week Movie Challenge: 'DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES' (Week 2 – An Action Fantasy Released After 2020)
“You don’t necessarily need to know everything about D&D to enjoy the ride, but a stacked cast and great visuals keep this heist moving.”
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a film released in 2023, directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley and starring Chris Pine as Edgin Darvis as well as Michelle Rodriguez as Holga Kilgore, among many others... It is ultimately about a charming bard who, along with a ragtag band of unlikely adventurers, orchestrates an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic and rescue his daughter from a treacherous former ally who has seized control of a fantasy metropolis with the help of a powerful Red Wizard.
52-WEEK MOVIE CHALLENGE: WEEK #2 - An Action Fantasy Released After 2020
Last week we had a ‘90s Susan Sarandon drama. This week, we’re talking about a post-2020 action fantasy film... I can tell this challenge is going to be quite a bit more specific than last year’s list, which was all about horror and very vague. Like... vampire... witch... ghost... zombie. Every now and then, that list would be a little bit specific, but this one is really exciting me right out of the gate.
So, there were quite a few films that I’d never seen that would have fit this prompt overall, and I was juggling between them quite a bit. I landed on this movie because it was a film that I believe I began when it first came out. I watched like maybe five minutes of it or something before I had to do something else. I don’t even remember why I stopped it, nor why I never came back to it. But I feel like it has to do with one thing...
I know nothing about Dungeons & Dragons. Nothing past the fact that they were playing it in E.T. and in Stranger Things, and that it has something to do with dice and not a traditional board game. It takes imagination, but there is at least some anchoring or rules... and that’s mostly what I don’t get. I sat in and watched a group of friends sit around a blank table and play the thing for four hours straight. They seemed to know what they were doing, but it confused the heck out of me the entire four hours because there was nothing to look at. They might as well have been playing with their eyes closed. I didn’t get it.
Needless to say, I worried about this movie. No matter how good or bad it was, it would always be a problem because I couldn’t 100% appreciate it based off of source material that I don’t understand. That means I wouldn’t catch references or inside jokes, or anything along those lines. However, I picked the movie because I’m a fan of fantasy, I’m a fan of action, and the cast in this film is stacked a mile high... from Chris Pine to Michelle Rodriguez, the Duke from Bridgerton [Regé-Jean Page], Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant, Chloe Coleman... the list goes on forever. The cast in this film was honestly quite insane.
The action, likewise, is pretty strong. The visuals of the fantasy world, the creatures, and the worldbuilding were not unnoticed. The way the film is ultimately shot, its editing, and the sweeping cinematography at times were on point. It had a lot going for it behind the scenes. It’s a great-looking film.
Narratively, it’s following a pretty typical, standard adventure plot. We have to get from point A to point B, and here are all of the stops we’re going to take before we get there. That’s fine. I actually appreciated that more, since there really was all of this stuff going on that you had to focus on all at once.
Though, I couldn’t help but think about the cast... this stacked cast of very well-known actors. Why I kept thinking on it was because none of them felt right for their roles. Then again, I don’t think anybody would have felt right, either. They seemed kind of like empty characters for any famous actor to fill... and that seemed to be a priority: get known actors for the poster to get people to see the movie. They didn’t do a bad job by any means, but they didn’t seem to fully belong, either. Whenever you do this, it stops being this character-forward thing and becomes more of an actor-forward basis. The characters have special abilities, which is always nice, but I feel like this could have been approached easier, ultimately.
I also think the movie is a tad too long. It’s enjoyable for what it is. It pulled me in quite a few times, but it also dragged down quite a few times as well. This movie was 2 hours and 15 minutes, which I would argue is nearly a half hour too long.
Overall, it’s a well-made movie with lots of fun action set pieces, great worldbuilding, and funny moments from our stacked cast. I liked the fact that you don’t necessarily need to know everything about D&D before seeing the movie, although I feel let down because if I did play the game, if I did know more inside jokes about the game... I more than likely would enjoy the movie more overall. I’m glad I saw it. I don’t think I need to see it again.
Unbiased/Technical Score: 39/50 or 78%
Biased/Entertainment Score: 39/50 or 78%
Total Combined Score: 78/100 (or 4/5 on Letterboxd)