Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves film review — CGI wizardry played for laughs

Dust off your little lead figures and 12-sided dice: Dungeons & Dragons is back and this time it doesn’t care who’s watching. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, the role-playing fantasy board game was the province of furtive clusters of boys in airless bedrooms and less-travelled corners of schools. Now it has shape-shifted into a $150mn movie attracting all ages and sexes who proudly attend screenings in costume and show no fear of being duffed up. Truly the geek has inherited the earth.

Exhibit A is Chris Pine, who with his square jaw and flirtatious smile looks like he would never have been caught dead hunched over a Monster Manual. He plays Edgin, a lute-playing chancer always equipped with a quip and flanked by the formidable Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a potato-loving warrior who is the equal of any man and has the bushy armpits to prove it. As members of a Robin Hood-ish band of ne’er-do-wells who mostly do good, they escape from incarceration and regroup, scooping up inept sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith) and new druid recruit Doric (Sophia Lillis) along the way.

As their noble quest takes shape, the film starts to display its role-playing origins, but Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves comes with a generous injection of irony. Certainly there isn’t the least whiff of honour about their old cohort Forge, a con artist turned populist ruler played by Hugh Grant in plummy tones that put the RP into RPG. In a delectable reprise of his turn in Paddington 2, Grant savours every drop of faux-sincerity and scheming as he provokes a plot to depose him. “It’s not the role of government to deny the people what they crave,” he tells two wealthy donors to his cause, sounding not unlike a certain party-loving former prime minister. “Or to deny rich bastards like you the right to profit off them.” (Writers of rightwing manifestos may feel they deserve a script credit.)

Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley prove adept dungeon masters, slick with the CGI wizardry but also quick to cut fight scenes mercifully short and play set pieces for laughs (witness the dragon with weight issues and the castle escape that’s more Tom and Jerry than D&D). Best of all, the writers seem allergic to portentousness, with trains of thought often derailed by plunges into comic bathos. At one point a character begins hymning a sacred burial ground on which they stand, only to be interrupted by “Has anyone got a shovel?” And there’s more than a pinch of Monty Python in the resurrection scene that follows — the dead by turns ratty, forgetful or tiresomely garrulous.

The result is a fun film that wears its ironware lightly, displaying a refreshing blast of irreverence that’s closer to The Princess Bride than, say, the grandiose recent Rings of Power series. The levity also means that when more heartfelt moments do arrive, there’s enough audience goodwill stored up to help the emotional landing stick.

Fantasy has long since ceased to be a niche market — Potter, Rings and Stranger Things have seen to that. Nevertheless, with previous D&D screen ventures mostly forgotten, Honour Among Thieves represents that rare thing: a new big-budget Hollywood franchise built almost from scratch. Paramount deserves huzzahs for taking the risk. If the box office plays along, it may just prove that sometimes it’s still worth rolling the dice — 12-sided of course.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from March 31