Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Finally, a good D&D film. I was beginning to think the property was cursed. I mean, how hard is it to make a decent movie about Dungeons and Dragons? Given that D&D is such an open-ended system, technically every medieval fantasy movie is a D&D movie. But it seems like whenever they intentionally try to market the D&D brand, it’s a failure. Okay, to be fair, I actually liked “Wrath of the Dragon God,” but that says more about my taste than the quality of the movie.

Honor Among Thieves is a good time regardless of whether or not you play tabletop RPGs. If you don’t like D&D, then just look at it as a generic fantasy movie. It’s not as grandiose as Lord of the Rings, it’s more of a lighthearted heist movie with a fantasy setting. If you are a D&D player, you’re going to spend a lot of time pointing at the screen and saying, “I understood that reference.” All the locations are taken from Forgotten Realms lore, and every creature is straight out of the monster manual. But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the movie.

The actors were carefully chosen so they could pretty much play themselves. Chris Pine is his usual quippy self, Hugh Grant is at his smarmiest, and Michelle Rodriguez is the typical tough gal. The rest of the cast don’t stand out as much, but they play their parts adequately. I really liked Sophia Lillis as the druid, though her performance was kind of subdued.

The movie is not without its plot holes, if you really want to look for them. There’s a dozen places where the druid’s shapeshifting ability could have solved a problem a lot faster than the solutions the characters came up with. They could have fixed some of these with a simple line of dialogue, but the movie takes the “look, something shiny!” approach instead. And that’s a good thing. Over-explaining the limits of each character’s abilities would have bogged the movie down, and I really think the movie’s “this is what we’re going with” approach keeps the story moving at a proper pace.

Bottom line, it’s a fun popcorn-muncher, and I think you’ll like it even if you’ve never touched a d20. But if this movie encourages people to finally give the game a try, so much the better.