Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ on Prime Video, Where You Don’t Need to be a Dweeb to Enjoy This Relentlessly Funny Fantasy Lark

From the Somewhat Gently Taking the Piss Dept. comes Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (streaming for Prime Video subscribers starting on Friday, August 24, 2023), a goofball fantasy lark based on the wildly popular 1980s role-playing game that helped fuel a goodly portion of the Satanic Panic. Those of us who found the frenzy laughable back then have something new to laugh at, since this film DARES to take the poker-faced swords-and-sorcery genre and sully it with comedy and a less stifling tone and narrative approach. That, courtesy of a star-studded cast led by Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez, and directors/co-writers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, whose 2018 outing Game Night made us not only laugh our fool heads off, but raise an eyebrow at their considerable visual versatility. The filmmakers applied their spirited dynamic to D&D: HAT, turning out one of the more surprisingly enjoyable genre outings in recent memory – so enjoyable, you may yearn for a movie-watching future with less Incredible Hulk and more umber hulks. 

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Edgin (Pine) is a Harper, whatever that is. There’s a running joke in the movie about his only skill being “making plans,” but he also can play the lute, the former being more helpful for his adventures in thievery with his crew of warriors and sorcerers and shapeshifters, and the latter being good for the occasional joke. Anyway, I looked it up, and within D&D lore, Harpers are noble types, notable in the context of Edgin’s character because he no longer is particularly noble. Maybe you deduced that when I used the words “adventures in thievery” a couple sentences ago. He changed his ways after evil wizards killed his wife, leaving him to single-dad his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman); he eventually befriended the barbarian asskicker Holga (Rodriguez), and the two of them wholly platonically raise Kira while leading a small group of likeminded rogues on not-so-morally-upstanding endeavors. 

It was during one of those endeavors that Edgin obtained the Tablet of Reawakening, which he wanted to use to bring his wife and Kira’s mom back from the dead. But one adventure in thievery went to shit, landing Edgin and Holga in a miserable prison citadel in the middle of a wintry Siberia-esque hellscape. But they escape to Neverwinter, where they learn that former colleagues Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) and creepy-ass wizard Sofina (Daisy Head) now rule the place, and are also evil, having taken Kira in and convinced her that her dad’s a crumb. Forge has Edgin and Holga tied up and just as they’re about to be beheaded Holga breaks her bonds and breaks some heads while Edgin takes forever just to figure out a way to escape his rope bondage. That’s the thing – he’s the brains, sort of, and she’s the brawn, although she also has some brains, and Edgin’s therefore frequently justifying his usefulness around here: “I make plans!” he frequently reminds everyone. 

Right, “everyone”: They include a couple of pals in Simon (Justice Smith), an elf-eared sorcerer whose insecurities render his powers less powerful, and Doric (It breakout star Sophia Lillis), a goat-horned druid who can shapeshift into animals, e.g., a snake, a mouse, a deer, an owlbear. They’re committed to helping Edgin and Holga reclaim Kira and her loyalty, and acquire the Tablet of Reawakening, and maybe snatch all of the riches the weaselly Forge keeps beneath his castle. Easier said than done – it’s not like they can just bum-rush Forge, because he has many faceless knights at his disposal, and Sofia is very powerful and apparently has tapped into some freaky occult shit. And so our heroes-who-are-almost-antiheroes must journey to and fro across the land, meeting allies like Xenk (Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page) – notably a pompous guy who’s very serious like he’s been dropped in from a very serious fantasy movie, which makes him very funny within this not very serious fantasy movie – and chasing down this thing that will help them acquire another thing, and then using the power of the another thing to get yet another thing, and so on. You know how this type of stuff works. It’s always convoluted, these quests, so very convoluted.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: D&D: HAT exists in the space between the serious fantasy of Lord of the Rings and a spoofy misfire like Your Highness – think the tricky space in-between, where The Princess Bride and Galaxy Quest found a way to be simultaneously funny and fantastical. It also vastly improves upon previous D&D outings, of which there are three, beginning with the forgettable 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie (starring Jeremy Irons, of all people), which inspired a trilogy rounded out with two direct-to-video junkheaps that I didn’t realize existed. 

Performance Worth Watching: The film’s effectiveness hinges on the chemistry of Pine (who’s witty without engaging in snark) and Rodriguez (whose furrowed-brow tone and expression are a shade away from winking camp). They have a strong script to work with, and come off effortlessly funny. 

Memorable Dialogue: The movie is full of snappy little exchanges like this, when Edgin and Holga arrive at a somber graveyard for warriors who died in battle, hoping to exhume and revive corpses to get information on one the whereabouts of one the film’s many MacGuffins:

Holga: I always imagined I’d be buried in sacred ground like this.

Edgin: Anyone got a shovel?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: As D&D: HAT indulges the use of a Pendant of Invisibility and other implements consisting of one word followed by an “of” followed by another word, I get out my Pen of Critical Inquiry to praise the movie’s abundant entertainment value. There are no delusions of grandeur here, no political allegories, no attempts to enlighten us to the frailties of the human condition. Nope, it’s popcorn japery in fine form: Swords against sorcery, sorcery against monsters, monsters against swords, and around and around, while the charismatic cast slam-bangs the consistently amusing setup/one-liner dialogue and the filmmakers employ clever visual techniques to keep the laughter on track while the characters are too busy fighting and scampering to be talking. Sure, some of the lengthy pseudo-tracking shots are the product of digital trickery, but somebody had to conceptualize and compose them, understanding that, if executed correctly, they’d capture and enhance the sense of rollicking fun that is the movie’s goal. (Game Night benefitted from similarly creative flourishes.)

The aforementioned fodder is plenty to keep crossover audiences entertained. Plenty. To appreciate it, one needn’t have spent hours and hours in a dim-lit pit pouring Mountain Dew over your Smurfberry Crunch with a half-dozen fellow dweebs, tossing 20-sided dice during endless D&D campaigns – but it doesn’t hurt. The action and multi-tiered-quest structure mirror the game play nicely, or so I’ve read; I wouldn’t know for sure. And of course the film is full of inside jokes and sly references waiting to be gobbled up by experienced Dungeon Masters everywhere (it’s set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, if that means anything to you), but you’ll appreciate the inherent comedy of a hungry gelatinous cube regardless of whether you’ve “fought” one before as a paladin-on-paper bearing a bastard sword and a concerningly dwindling number of hit points. The source material is just an opportunity for more jokes, and more jokes is always OK. A movie like this can’t have enough jokes. Think of all the movies you’ve endured that didn’t have nearly enough jokes! They’re terrible, while this one is very clearly not. 

We could gripe about some aspects of the film – its tendency toward CGI overkill for sure, an overreliance on flashbacks, maybe, or not giving Hugh Grant quite enough opportunities to be a cheeky smarmy shithead, perhaps. But then I think of all the jokes, like the one in which the Xenk character is so heroic he’s a humorless buzzkill who wouldn’t recognize irony if it was a shambling mound wrapping a vine around his neck and squeezing. Or the one about the walking-brain creatures who only attack intelligent beings, and therefore don’t attack any of the principal characters. The film also doles out smidgens of earnest emotion like pudding cups at a slumber party, lest it cease to have any dramatic weight whatsoever. Not that we’d ever take any of this seriously; Lord of the Rings really shouldn’t be taken seriously, but at least D&D: HAT gives us plenty of excuses not to. Plenty.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is silly, but only as silly as it needs to be. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.