THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Created in the 1970s, the very first Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game gets a fourth film adaptation (subtitled “Honor of Thieves”) in which a band of somewhat rogue broken arms go on an adventure to recover a lost relic. Edgin, a slightly overwhelmed bard (Chris Pine), and his confidante Holga, a combative barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), betrayed by the magician Forge Fletcher (Hugh Grant), are joined by a novice wizard, a devoted paladin and a chameleon druid.
The general picture evokes a fantastic Middle Ages in the continuity of the Lord of the Rings and of Game Of Thrones. He also draws his inspiration from THE Goonies, Monthy Python: Holy Grail And Star Wars. Shot in Northern Ireland, around Belfast, the film majestically flies over verdant landscapes that could easily appear on the first pages of a travel brochure.
Throughout this DIY and spectacular saga, designed to appeal to both experienced and newcomers alike, Edgin has a knack for hatching plans that fail, prompting him to use strategy to design new ones. His perseverance reveals the addiction that the Dungeons & Dragons fan club was struck by, able to play endless games several nights in a row without seeing the time pass.
Special effects, gags and jokes
In a logic that unfolds gradually, the use of superpowers turns out to be playful and inventive. If they sometimes turn out to be a MacGuffin (a pretext that revives a fiction), there is the pleasure of seeing a four hundred meter long teleportation tunnel unfold, a deadly cube of gelatin appear or even witnessing the throwing a simple potato…
Directed by the duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, authors of the comedies How to kill his boss 1 And 2 (2011 and 2014) and game night (2018), the film distils, in the middle of the great epic images, gags and jokes, what now seems to be the only way to digest the mountain of special effects, since James Gunn did it for Guardians of the Galaxy.
There’s a pudgy dragon with seal-stepping gait, an owl bear, billows of crimson smoke blown by angry sorcerers, and contrasting loves between the mighty Holga and her three-inch-tall lovers… The resuscitation scene corpses appears as a funny and moving allegory of the famous game. If the skeletons do not have their share of five questions, they remain awake under the yoke of a boiling brain.
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