Thoughts on the D&D Movie

I always love when a movie could very easily be bad, or even bad and profitable, but the creators take the time to make a good movie, instead.

And lucky me, Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves is a good movie!

If you know a lot about Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll have a fun time pointing excitedly at little details like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

If you know a little bit about Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll have a fun time recognizing some general ideas but mostly watching talented actors bumble around like a party stuck on a puzzle the DM was pretty sure would take five minutes.

If you know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons, but you enjoy a good joke and you find Chris Pine charming, you’ll have a good, slightly confusing time as you try to figure out what counts as unexpected in this world.

And if you know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons and you don’t enjoy jokes or Chris Pine, I guess you should get back to running an HOA and refusing to give back the toys frightened neighborhood kids lost in your yard.

That’s really all you need to know, but here’s a little more

Pros

• There’s a dragon in this movie, and this dragon is one of my favorite dragons to ever dragon up the big screen.

• Chris Pine.

• The jokes are genuinely funny.

• Not for a single second did I feel bogged down in World Exposition. Underdark = Scary? Cool, got it, moving on. Red wizard = bad? Dig. I follow. Harpers are good guy spies? I remember that from my first ever character’s backstory, so it’s good thing we didn’t harp on that.

Cons

• It’s on the long side. I enjoyed it all, but it can be hard carving out the time to see a movie like this in theaters.

• Halfling Bradley Cooper looks impossibly unsettling. So does the one Tabaxi in that one scene.

• Bard could bard harder.

• Won’t change your life or teach you something new and profound. We can’t all be Griffin McElroy over here.

But hey, I’m glad that this movie was made, and I sure hope people go see it in theaters so that more movies like this get made.