Last night’s (April 4) movie was Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a production of Paramount Pictures in association with eOne (short for “Entertainment One,” a subsidiary of Hasbro, which owns the Dungeons and Dragons game on which the film is based). It’s actually at least the seventh attempt to base a film on Dungeons and Dragons, with the first one dating back to 1984, and I’d been a bit dubious about going to see it in a theatre. The promotion pieces for it, not just the official trailers but also the appearances by various cast members (njotablyHugh Grant, who plays one of the two principal villains), had made me worry that Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves would be one of those misbegotten movies that attempts to be both a serious dramatic piece (here, a sword-and-sandals adventure) and a spoof of the genre. Happily, the people behind this movie – co-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, and their writing collaborators, Chris McKay and Michael Gilio (McKay and Gilio are credited with the original story and Gilio, Goldstein and Daley with the script) – managed to get the balance just right. There were certain scenes which reminded me uncomfortably of Monty Python and the Holy Grail – particularly the scene in which the leads, Edgini (Chris Pine, who also co-produced) and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), start singing a duet as Edgin is riding a horse and playing a mandolins at the same time, and I mumbled under my breath, “And they were forced to eat Sir Robin’s minstrels, and there was much rejoicing (yay)” – but for the most part Daley, Goldstein and their collaborators keep Dungeons and Dragons well balanced between serious and comic aspects.
The script is peppered with modern-day idioms like “I’ve got this” and “Plan B” that would sit uneasily in a serious film about the Middle Ages but work well in this light-hearted context. And though the film as a whole is a typical-for-the-genre alternation of spectacular action scenes and exposition to get from one action highlight to the next, the exposition scenes don’t have the leaden dullness they often do in a film like this. The film opens in a dungeon (so that checks off half the title already) where Edgin and Holga are incarcerated. It turns out Edgin is a “harper,m” which doesn’t mean an historian as it does in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern cycle (and when, oh when, is somebody going to film that?) but the Dungeons and Dragons world’s equivalent of a Grail Knight, an association of people who go about righting the world’s wrongs and returning ill-gotten gains back to the people they were stolen from in the first place. Only Edgin and his wife Zia (Georgia Landers) got tired of having to give back all these stolen treasures to the people theyt were stolen from. So they started keeping them, only that got Zia murdered by a gang of cutthroats and Edgin’s and Zia’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) kidnapped.
Kira ends up being raised by Forge (Hugh Grant), a charming bad guy who manages to amass a fortune with which he bought a loordship and announces that he’s going to re-start a series of cruel games that were abolished years before. Edgin hooks up with Holga and the two of them become freelance thieves (apparently in Dungeons and Dragons the game, “thief” is a specific rank that you rise from as the game progresses). Edgin is determined to recover a magic tablet that will alow him to bring hs long-lost wife Zia back to life, and in order to do this he hookes up with two more people, Simon (Justice Smith), a mediocre sorcerer with major self-confidence issues; and Doric the Druid (Sophia Lillis), who among her other talents is an ability to shape-shift into anything from a giant white bear (at least that’s what I thought it looked like) to a worm. This Unfantastic Four set off in search of a magic helmet that will enable its wearer to contact enormously poerful beings and help them vanquish the villains, Forge (who seems to combine the worst aspects of Donald Trump and Valdimir Putin) and his witch girlfriend Sofina (Daisy Head), the most super-powerful being in the dramatis personae and so malevolently nasty she makes Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz look like Mother Teresa by comparison. Our four good guys end up fighting in the super-games – at which point the film turns into The Hunger Games meets The Maze Runner, especially when one of the big hazards in the game is a constantly shape-shifting maze – until they discover that Forge has loaded a ship with all the money various wealthy people have bet on the outcome of the games. Obviously he intends to hijack the treasure and keep it for himself, then take Kira with him and live out the rest of his life as two highly well-paid fugitives from justice.
Our heroes determine to capture the ship and hijack it themselves, and in accordance with a promise Edgin had to make to Xenk (Regé-Jean Page, whose face has been acclaimed as the most perfectly proportioned male face in history, though I don’t know who made that determination or on what criteria) that in exchange for his help getting the magic helmet they’d agree to give the stolen treasure back to the people of Forge’s kingdom. (Xenk is a character who gets annoying rather quickly in his prissy self-righteousness; he’s a spoof of the 100 percent good guys who abound in genre fiction like this.) Eventually there’s a big battle and our heroes win,though Holga is mortally wounded and Edgin decides to use the tablet – which can only be used once – not to revive his long-dead wife but to bring back to life the recently killed Holga instead. I saw Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in a theatre equipped with “Dolby Atmos,” which is essentially the same principle as Universal’s 1970’s-era effect “Sensurround,” which meant including subsonic vibrations on the soundtrack so the floor of the theatre would rumble during the movie and add verisimilitude to the actioin effects. (In at least one theatre showing the very first Sensurround movie, Earthquake!, the effect worked too well; the theatre’s old ceiling started crumbling under the pressure of the Sensurround waves and pieces of the ceiling started falling. Some patrons understandably panicked at the thought that a real earthquake was happening during a movie about one.)
There’s also a clever conceit that in order to get the information about what happened to the magic helmet, Simon the not-very-good sorcerer has to ask the corpses of the people who fought in the battle for it five questions each. They can be revived by a spell Simon happens to know, only after they’re asked five questions they go back to being dead, this time for keeps. This leads to a quite charming post-credits sequence in which one of the revivified corpses complains that he’s only been asked four questions, and he pleads with whoever’s in earshot to ask him another question so he can go back to being dead already. I turned to the young man sitting next to me and said, “O.K., I’ll ask him another question, "Will there be a sequel to this movie?” “Probably,” the young man said, and if there is I’d certainly want to see it, especially if Daley and Goldstein remain involved in making it!
