Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves delivers on what it promises. There are dungeons and dragons and thieves. If you had the pleasure of watching the trailers for the past four months and also absorbed the San Diego Comic-Con press tour, you are well aware of the sight gags: fat dragons, orifices, Detective Pikachu is going to meet Bridgerton is going to meet Captain Kirk, and at some point Hugh Grant is going to be squeamishly cruel while Chris Pine is restrained like a little Japanese school girl by a tentacle monster. Also, Michelle Rodriguez is in this movie and she is going to brawl like a fucking tank. All of that happens! The movie is almost as long as a full campaign but it never quite feels long? Except when Chris Pine is singing on his lute. Or really when anyone is singing along with him. Do I have some questions? Sure. Did this movie make me break out into hysterical and unexpected laughter more than once? Absolutely. Am I skeptical of the ability of this movie to replicate its success in later films? Sure. Will that impinge on your ability to enjoy this movie? Possibly!
What’s important right now is for you to know what worked and what didn’t. So, what worked? What’s clear even from the trailer is that the film has split its allotment of villains into two baskets: in one basket is the cartoonishly evil Red Wizards–shooting lightning out of their hands, throwing kittens into rivers, setting people’s babies on fire, etc.–the Voldemort basket, if you will, and in the other basket is the scoundrel-y, double-crossing, ultimately crueler because of its mundanity, the Draco basket, let’s call it. I’m a fan of splitting villains generally, whether it’s for powerscaling reasons (think goombas vs. Bowser), or because you want to be able to have some of the bad guys momentarily turn on other bad guys (think Thanos vs. Ronan the Accuser), or just because it extends the story somewhat (think Casino Royale’s distinct first and second acts).
Rick Remender’s Seven to Eternity was probably the most fun variant of the enemies to friends plot in a D&D-type story I’ve ever encountered for many of the same reasons cited above. The Mud King’s capture forces a motley band of heroes to endure some very wise cracks from the most silver of silver tongues. The forces at work to return him to power are sundry and legion, but there are all sorts who have motives for inflicting maximal pain on him before he can be brought to justice. In Honor Among Thieves, I was a little worried that the trailer had given away too much of the Red Wizard’s arc (and in some ways it does), but there’s a fair bit of interaction between the wizard and the rest of the cast, which doesn’t rely on combat to resolve itself. Probably the most satisfying villain is actually Hugh Grant, whose quick and easy lies devastate and vex by virtue of his former place as a trusted confidante.
Does Hugh Grant have a power? Is he a wizard? I ask all twelve Friends who made it to this over-invited movie event. “No, he’s just a guy.” But all the other guys can turn into bears and stuff, right? So what’s his deal? “He doesn’t have a deal. He’s just a thing.” The film does have a fair bit of excellent power scaling in it. Not every character is made equally. I think a lot about how one of my favorite parts of Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is the fact that your party is composed of 1) a plumber, 2) a princess, 3) a prince made of clouds, 4) a lizard king, and 5) a fucking fallen star wizard puppet that has a move that does over 9000 damage. Just so, Honor Among Thieves features a dude who can’t play the lute miming playing the lute, a brawler, a minor sorcerer, a shapeshifter, a… just normal guy with plans, I guess?, and Regé-Jean Page, skilled swordsman and powerful magical being. It means that the party has a formidable opponent to guard against big and small problems as they occur. A friend described this “everybody gets a moment” quality to the movie as reminiscent of the best elements of Phase 2 in the MCU, those Avengers moments when you’d get to see Iron Man do something badass and then maybe Cap would do something that would get the crowd cheering, etc. Kind of reminds me of how Gandalf in his infinite wisdom doesn’t call Eagles to deliver the Ring of Power to Mordor in a day’s time, but instead concocts a generations-long plan to have halflings journey for thousands of miles to assemble the forces of Man, Elf, and Dwarf to… eventually have Eagles finish the job, etc. (Jean-Regé Page is in this movie for approximately ten minutes, by the way, leading me to wonder what his actual deal is or if he’s coming back for another to reprise his role? And while we’re on the topic of reprising your role–my biggest question before seeing this movie was whether or not this was going to be a series of sequels or an anthology series, which used the D&D landscape as a sandbox for telling stories, á la Star Wars, and Friend revealed his greatest wish is that at the end of the movie, we’d get a credits scene where all the party would be in their house cleaning up from the game and maybe someone of them but not all of them would come back for the next movie but they’d all be different characters, like American Horror Story, which I think is incredibly badass). Even if Hugh Grant had been a wizard, life would’ve been pretty hard for him.
Wizards in this adventure, for whatever reason, have simultaneously the greatest number of encumbrances on their abilities (collars that inhibit their powers, rooms where they can’t do stuff) and also the greatest strength (if you’re the baddies). It made me feel so bad to watch this elf shapeshifter thing sit back for so many parts of the movie, allowing herself to get chased by God knows how many two-legged, terrestrial apes or whatever, when she could be hiding as a fly or shooting people in the eye with acid quills or whatever. You’re squinting at my last comment but you’re the one that forgot that there are OWL BEARS in this universe, so why can’t there be a poison-tipped hedgehog, you small-minded prick? In terms of Detective Pikachu’s wizardly powers, he’s got the coolest bag of chaotic energy. A lot of his spells are one-shots or he doesn’t actually understand how they work or have control over when they happen.
And I mention this pair in the same breath because the movie so desperately wants you to ship them together, and now we’re going to go into spoiler territory, but I feel like it’s necessary to discuss at this moment. The ending of this movie significantly has the shapeshifter give herself as the prize to Detective Pikachu for accomplishing his quest of self-discovery. It’s a bit sad and, honestly, is there a being more self-sufficient than a druid who can change her shape and then experience the world as that animal? Why would you ever want to shack up with a loser you’d already dumped and then forgotten? But it’s part of a larger theme for the film, which is to say, I’m not sure if Honor Among Thieves is the straightest fantasy film ever made or just an aggressively straight film. Every character except maybe the dragon is written as straight, coupled with a romantic partner, with the one notable exception which is actually one of the big surprises of the movie, the surrogate mother twist (which, please do not misunderstand, I think is one of the sweetest and more pure parts of the movie). But even the “committed Platonic life partner” comment that roiled the San Diego Comic-Con’s panel for the movie kind of plays with queering the narrative without actually doing so. It’s not as if Ed’s wife was a husband or Rodriguez’s man was a woman or an orc or whatever. I wonder a little if this is an element of the tabletop game as less so a laziness of the writers, since so much of the value system of D&D appears to be about the family you choose, the relationships you forge through collective action, and the (oftentimes tragic) backstories of the party is the fuel which propels the team into their campaigns. But good God, you’d think the chick who can turn into a deer would be a little more freaky?
For a movie that was so heavily marketed and whose trailer was in theaters for months, the movie itself feels fresher than most: nothing in the plot feels forced for the sake of moving things along (except the singing), some of the jokes were changed from the trailer, minimal trailer fatigue.
