Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

PG-13 for action fantasy violence.  I keep using my currently nine-year-old son as my litmus for how upsetting things are for kids.  (He's a sensitive soul.) He got really scared at the even-concept of Red Witches, so that was a no-go.  He kept protesting watching the movie, but he also might have been the one who had the most fun with the movie besides me.  He was earnestly invested when everyone else discovered Instagram Reels.  There's also some language.

DIRECTORS:  John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein

Do you know how much I want to learn to play Dungeons & Dragons?  It's got a billion rules.  It takes forever to play and you need to have consistent gameplaying friends.  That doesn't exist for me, nor will it exist for me.  I have played dumbed down versions of D&D and loved it.  I have one student in particular who really goes into savant mode when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons.  While I might not know this very complicated game, I can say that Dungeons & Dragons did the best thing that it possibly could do: it made this incredibly nerdy thing incredibly fun for an audience.

There was another Dungeons & Dragons movie, if I remember.  I think both versions of Dungeons & Dragons might be interesting artifacts reflecting the eras they were in.  Honestly, you can just read the studios behind both movies and what the expectations were when making these movies. I'm incredibly glad to live in an era where studios get that movies need to be fun and to let people get a little nerdy with their concepts.  It's funny because I honestly don't think you need a ton of knowledge of what D&D is when entering this movie. Heck, you don't even need to know that it is a game.  We live in a post Lord of the Rings world.  We can thank J.R.R. Tolkien for doing the heavy lifting when it comes to getting audiences prepped for a Dungeons & Dragons movie because this movie is aesthetically very Lord of the Rings but culturally the anti-Lord of the Rings.  It's no secret that Tolkien was a linguist and a world-builder first and a storyteller second. His stories are gold and I don't want to take anything away from him. But Tolkien enjoyed letting you know all of the nuances of the world.

Honor Among Thieves does not do that.  While we have a fairly hamfisted exposition about the role of this mythical world, the film wisely has the attitude of "just go with it." Whoever was the dungeonmaster of this world made the world rich, but that is almost arbitrary.  The place feels lived in, but none of that matters beyond the fact that the film asks you to put your trust in its settings.  Ed and Holga have to walk the map to get back home?  Okay.  I'll believe you that it can be done.  There's a lot of that.  We have no real idea of how grand the world of Honor Among Thieves is and that's okay.  I keep saying these seemingly insulting things, but these are all elements that are pluses for the film.  Because this is an adaptation of a concept, there's almost no need to really feel tied to the source material because the source material in itself is fluid. Instead, we get the idea that Honor Among Thieves is trying to grasp the soul of the game. We are given archetypes that feel like character classes from the game.  They are given a standard quest (to get back Ed's daughter) and to overthrow a traitor.  Because we have a need to have a character arc, we're going to throw a bunch of storytelling elements that allow for our protagonists to go through character changes.  It's just solid storytelling.

I can't believe I'm advocating for the movie's fluff because it is absolute fluff, but that works.  Chris Pine is playing Chris Pine.  I was able to trick my son (yes, the one with the sensitive soul) back to Star Trek because he's basically playing James T. Kirk the bard.  I can almost smell the execs behind the scenes of this movie hoping that Honor Among Thieves will be the start of a Dungeons & Dragons franchise that they can spinoff time and again.  As much as that should make me roll my eyes, Honor Among Thieves does exactly that.  The first movie in a franchise should be simple and fun.  It is all about establishing tone for the series and that's what this movie does.  It's the sequel that is meant to complicate things.  It's why I like Back to the Future Part II as my favorite (hot take!) of the series. The first movie, as complicated as it might be, is fundamentally about a boy learning who his parents are.  The complicated plot and character dynamics really ramp up in the sequel and that's what a sequel is for.  Once the setting and the tone is there, you can play.  But for a first movie, we get that these people need to know each other and have some flaws.

Can Chris Pine only play these characters?  Listen, I love Chris Pine.  I'm surprised I'm not seeing him in more stuff.  But this is a guy who is all charisma and that's a good thing.  On paper, this is a movie about Ed, whose cockiness and self-assuredness has brought him nothing but misery.  But that sounds bleak and despairing.  Instead, we have a guy who says he's miserable.  We even understand that he's full of regret.  But none of that is going to stop him from having a good time on this mission.  Like Star Trek, he's placed in a leadership role where people treat him like a buffoon until they realize that he's mostly right about things.  It's funny, because there is a character arc to both Ed and James T. Kirk.  It's just that the arc is far more subtle.  He never fundamentally changes his behavior from an outward perspective.  When Ed is confessing to his daughter that he's been a bad dad, his behavior really hasn't changed.  He's still a thief.  He still relies on his overabundance of confidence and planning that has made him the character that he is today.  He's just secretly penitent about these things.  (Okay, not so secretly.  We know that he's penitent because he told us that he is.  It's just weird that his actions don't necessarily reflect that sense of guilt.) 

I was just told that this movie did poorly.  I never know these things when I first have a baby.  To me, all movies are doing fine and they jump to streaming so quickly that I didn't know that these movies didn't do great.  But there's a bummer here because this movie opens a lot of doors.  Don't get me wrong.  I think that Honor Among Thieves is a great standalone movie.  In fact, there's almost something Firefly-ish about the whole thing.  These characters are so likable that I'm sure that there's probably a certain degree of fan outrage that we'll not see these characters in more adventures.  But I do want to see the door that was opened in terms of exploring the concept of magic.  Simon is this character that seems like he has a wealth of backstory that is ready to be explored.  That might be the biggest problem with the archetype thing that I gushed over earlier.  Simon, at this point in the story, is the sorcerer.