Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Best described a romp.

There’s understandably a fair bit of exposition but the film makes a joke out of characters having to explain overly complex backstories, so it breezes along merrily. Hugh Grant as the conman Forge is excellent, as is Michelle Rodriguez as a potato-eating barbarian. Actually, all the cast are pretty good.

The plot follows a kind of shaggy dog story where the central character Edgin (Chris Pine) attempts to reunite with his daughter. This nominally simple process is complicated by a heist gone wrong (part of the backstory) an icy prison, a duplicitous former comrade, and a big-bad evil with their own terrible plans. Things repeatedly go wrong and the plans-within-plans fall flat in amusing and self-defeating ways. Overall is a pretty good way to give the dramatic sense of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign but with better pacing, funnier jokes and neat special effects.

Largely it looks like a generic 2020s fantasy setting but there are some inventive sequences. An extended chase sequence in which the druid Doric has to escape from a castle pursued by a powerful wizard and has to keep changing into different animals was very nicely done.

Nothing very deep going on here. Fights, jokes, evil magicians, rambling events and not entirely competent heroes.