2 out of 5

Directed by: Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley

Give me this movie in the 80s with puppets and clunky sets and I’m set. I’ll even take a 90s version with a mix of clunky CGI and practically-done flair. Alas, in a movie era where we can do big-ass spectacle on the small screen, and ensemble action comedies have been nigh-templated by Marvel, Dungeons & Dragons unfortunately comes across as an identity-less Guardians of the Galaxy riff, despite best intentions.

I suspect some of the genre-specific nods happening here might help things along, but to a non-D&D player, maybe ‘Honor Among Thieves’ largest sin is not giving me any real sense of setting. While the costumes are rags and armor, and the baddies are sorcerers and dragons, the world of the movie (and its inhabitants) never quite feel distinct enough to sell the fantasy. Screenwriters / directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (with co-scripting from Michael Gilio) try to distract from this by keeping the movie moving – sweeping along from a questionably extended voiceover intro into a fast-paced scene-switching fetch quest, to allow our heroes to steal the ultimate treasure from the ultimate bad guy (played with amusing but generic aplomb by Hugh Grant) – and leads Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez do a good approximation of odd-couple banter, delivering quips and puns in quick succession, but all of that distraction is perhaps the problem as well: the movie is never confident enough to relax, and assumes its gotta dress up its source material with modern flashiness.

But it only confuses matters, and even jokes have a hard time landing. In the micro, a good example is Rodriguez’s character, Holga’s, introduction – shown as a comically stoic brute, the movie seems to be making a point that she doesn’t talk, or that it’s only in clipped semi-nonsense a la Drax, but then suddenly she does talk, and it’s conversational. These kinds of “doing it for a joke” gaffes are committed across a good swath of the movie, nipping bits and pieces from – mostly – GotG, but trying to do John Wick action at points as well (kudos to Rodriguez and her stunt person in these scenes, though). What’s frustrating is that there’s an undercurrent of 80s adventure Indiana Jones-esque cheeky inspiration here that peeks through all the glitz, and a pretty funny script that’s just not edited / directed to land its jokes. That maybe makes it an effective B-movie, but those don’t exactly exist nowadays; D&D is too much of a hodgepodge of modern action tropes to necessarily be bad enough for B – it’s moreso just undistinguished.

That said, removed of expectations, it’s an appeasing Marvel-lite affair, something to satisfy that harmless tone without the need to watch accompanying movies or TV shows; Goldstein, Daley and Gilio may have sacrificed any level of immersiveness for accessibility, but I’ll allow that that does make it an incredibly plug-and-play adventure, with some minor chuckles and interesting concepts continually thrown at you for two hours.