I'm a life long Dungeons and Dragons player of both the Tabletop RPG and the Video Games. And I'm sorry to say I found this film to be extremely irritating and dissapointing.
The real problem with this film is that it's essentially a fantasy comedy written with the depth and maturity of a 10 year old kid, is aimed at a 10 year old audience, or viewers with that mental age. While a few of the jokes are mildly funny, the film just goes from joke to joke to joke, all the way through so that nothing in the plot or world is taken with any gravitas or authenticity. This is an utter exercise in bathos.
Just because the film makes a 100 nods to D&D Lore does not a Dungeons and Dragons film make. The story and characters are lacking in any of the depth, magic or mystery that exists within the Dungeons and Dragons universe, and just comes across as an attempt to target the lowest common denominator in modern culture, essentially people with 10 second attention spans. Lots of silly jokes, none stop action and the spectacle of special effects.
Dungeons and Dragons as a game and fantasy world is not a comedy and only people who are incapable of exploring mature themes because they take everything as a joke, play it as one. It seems pretty obvious to me that the writers of this film think that D&D is a joke.
Whenever my friends and I play a Tabletop game, sure funny things happen in our adventures that leave us rolling in laughter, but for the most part the adventures are taken seriously, and the themes explored in D&D are not comedic. Dark curses, ancient magic, realms of wonder and beauty, and stories of heroism and loyalty, tradgedy and betrayal. And this film is an utter betrayal of the real spirit of Dungeons and Dragons.
If you look at the 1980's D&D cartoons, you will see the real spirit of the game. The cartoons, while including occassional comic relief ( which is fine, because it's not over done), are for the most part serious and melancholic stories about a world where good and evil hang in the balance. The over arching storyline of the cartoons is a melancholic tale of lost innocence and a group of friends on a quest to find their way home. That is the soul of Dungeons and Dragons that I know from the source material and video games.
A good comparison for what a real Dungeons and Dragon's film should be is the original Star Wars Trilogy, New Hope etc. While the original Star Wars are family friendly films, they are not comedies, but action adventure and space opera. The original Star Wars contain comic relief ( C3PO, Chewbaccca etc ), but the comedy there does not ruin the otherwise serious themes of Star Wars - the epic battle between good and evil. This film is to D&D what the new Star Wars films ( rise of blah etc ) are to the original Star Wars trilogy - a travesty.
To conclude Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Theives is a dissapointing and cliched rendition by writers who clearly do not understand the game they have poorly attempted to translate onto the big screen. Is this film, complete trash? I guess not, it's somewhat entertaining if you are bored and have nothing better to do. But if you want Fantasy Comedy (That's actually funny), go watch Mythic Quest, Army of the Dead, or Monty Python's Holy Grail instead. If you're looking for great fantasy, then go watch the original Willow or Legend, Labyrinth or Krull. If you're looking for an authentic Dungeons and Dragons story, then go watch the 1980's cartoons, they are far superior to this film in every way.
And if you don't want to be subjected to two hours of mind numbing cringefest, then give this movie a miss.
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