Review: Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Thieves Saves Honor in D&D Movies

Could we resuscitate in the cinema the famous license Dungeons & Dragons after the terrible adaptation of the same name, released in 2000? This was the question that we could ask ourselves precisely when a reboot project was undertaken in the early 2010s. It is nevertheless true that after the monumental failure of twenty years ago, there is no had no great risk of doing worse.

Fans of this universe could still have reason to be alarmed, as they were mistreated. After the first D&D, two other attempts have emerged — The Supreme Power in 2006 and The Book of Darkness in 2012. We will refrain from talking about it. We will simply point out that these films have slipped into direct-to-video. It gives an idea of ​​the level.

This reboot, titled Honor of Thieveswas he going to save the honor of D&D, after the souls of the fans have been so scarred? The production, entrusted to Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, could raise questions: the duo do not have a high-flying CV. They only made two films, Long live the holidays And game nightneither of which is of much interest.

Yet it is a completely honest copy that the two filmmakers make. It’s even a good surprise for a license that comes from so far. Gone is the impasse in which this well-known universe of those who practice tabletop role-playing had gotten into. This time, the film offers a pleasant moment of cinema, it is true helped in this by decent special effects.

Dungeons & Dragons is beautiful

The days of the digital mush of the 2000s have passed and it shows. It’s hard to miss visual tricks these days, unless you put bad will into it. The budget, of course, helps. We are talking about an envelope of $150 million. But the best is sometimes the enemy of the good: the CGIs take up a little too much space, to the detriment of more natural settings.

Everything is very beautiful in D&D, like any blockbuster. But above all, the film avoids the pitfall of the fan film where the costumes seem too shiny, which has the knack of sparing us this impression of seeing cosplayers parading in front of the camera. In the genre, the film Warcraft had suffered from it: we had the impression that the characters did not belong to their world.

Talking to fans and talking to others

For the studio as for the directors, the challenge when handling such a license which already has a well-established fanbase, is to succeed in speaking to two audiences: the fans and the others. Honor of Thieves could not be a simple catalog of winks and references. He also had to be clear for the curious cinephile, with a story that holds up.

This is the case: the feature film manages to evolve on this crest line, managing to fit into a well-established universe, with its codes, its history and its imagination, while offering readable characters and understandable issues. Even when the characters jargon a little, you never feel like you’ve been dropped in the middle of the countryside.

So of course, all of this is made possible by great simplification and by express explanation sequences. This is illustrated at the beginning of the film, with a clever scenario that serves to quickly situate who is who, what is happening and why the heroes are in such a situation. The argument scene is actually very convenient to quickly launch the story.

We won’t lie to you: the themes of Honor of Thieves have been seen and seen again in heroic fantasy. You won’t fall off your chair. We have a protagonist who has fallen from his pedestal and finds himself with a status of less than nothing, a phase of building up the team, a serious and mortal threat hanging over the world, a mimic redemption for the hero…

The film chose a marked path, but at least it follows it correctly. Contrasting with the first three cinematographic attempts, Honor of Thieves opted for comedy on all floors. Choice was made not to take itself quite seriously, even if a few scenes wanting to be dramatic and epic are slipped in here and there. It hadn’t worked in time.

For a first film to relaunch D&D in the cinema, the directors were not going to opt for a very audacious construction and it shows: the different acts are predictable, like the resolution of the plot. It doesn’t exude originality, there is no remarkable staging, nor a stunning composition, but is that what the public will be looking for when buying a ticket?

If moviegoers want winks around the D&D universe – we think in particular of Baldur’s Gate, they will be served. If they will want to detect mechanics reminding them of role-playing games, they will not leave empty-handed either. Inevitably, we sometimes say to ourselves that behind these characters, there are the players themselves, whom we never see.

Some weaknesses that could be blamed on the film can also be seen as strengths. The characters are archetypal (the extremely strong and straight-laced paladin who knocks down enemies in packs of twelve, the low-ceilinged barbarian with a restricted vocabulary), but isn’t that how the characters are created? heroes of RPG games?

Not everything always works in this Dungeons and Dragons. The young actress who plays Kira Darvis, the hero’s daughter, seems to have completely missed her role. The recurring sarcasm of the characters, which can be pleasant, is sometimes used too often – and this is a fault of Hollywood cinema: everything is taken over the leg, which defuses the stakes.

But the film understood who it was aimed at and, above all, it avoided making the D&D universe an obstacle to understanding the script and the characters. You don’t have to be a veteran who’s rolled his bump in dozens of companions on paper. If there are references, they in no way hinder the following of the plot. The film rightly avoids being too meta. It’s happy.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Thieves hits theaters on April 12, 2023.

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