Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) Review

 "Just pay them with magic."

-Holga Kilgore

After a heist goes wrong, two thieves, Edgin (Chris Pine) and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), manage to escape from prison.  Desperate to get back to his daughter, Edgin puts together a team of adventurers to go on a series of quests that involves both dungeons and dragons. 

Mild spoilers below...

What Works:

My favorite part of games like Dungeons & Dragons is how the players come up with the most insane and stupid ways to get through the quest.  I love bullshit plans people manage to pull off and even when they fail miserably.  This movie captures that part of the game perfectly.  The characters are constantly coming up with hairbrained schemes and give the film a wonderful creative energy.  This kind of stuff makes the game worth playing and the movie worth watching.

I love the core cast of characters.  Everyone is really funny and gets plenty of time to shine.  Chris Pine is my favorite of the group because he is almost entirely worthless.  He can't really fight.  Everything he tries goes wrong.  The only thing he has going for him is his refusal to give up and that makes him an awesome protagonist.

The action sequences are an absolute blast and have a nice variety.  We get a lot of weird creatures, creative ways to solve the conflict, and different forms of combat.  It's fun when it's physical or magical.  I especially love Doric's (Sophia Lillis) escape from the castle.  She can shapeshift, so she takes on the form of several different animals in order to escape.  It's a lot of fun and just the type of weird bullshit I wanted from this movie.

I absolutely love the designs of the creatures.  We get some nice practical effects for some of the non-human denizens of the kingdom and they look fantastic.  The baby cat-creature is adorable.  And the various creatures our heroes fight aren't your standard fantasy movie fare.  We get plenty of unusual creatures for them to take on and the dragons they do fight are definitely not your run-of-the-mill movie dragons.  It's a nice change of pace for the genre.

Finally, we get a cameo from Bradley Cooper and it's a pretty elite cameo.  It's funny, unexpected, and does a good job of shading in Holga's backstory.

What Sucks:

I will say the movie takes a bit to get going.  After the opening sequence, the movie slows down to give us exposition and build the world.  There's a lot going on there.  Probably too much.  I definitely wasn't able to grasp everything.  I'm sure it will be better on a rewatch with subtitles.  But once everything is established, the movie takes off.

Finally, the villains of the movie are undercooked.  We didn't get enough development for Forge (Hugh Grant) or Sofina (Daisy Head).  I wish we could have had more of Forge interacting with the cast earlier on so that his betrayal would mean more.  It also felt like some of Sofina's scenes were cut.  They were much flatter characters as opposed to our heroes.

Verdict:

Honor Among Thieves is an absolute blast and captures the creative spirit of the game perfectly.  The main cast is great, especially Chris Pine, and the action and creatures are creative with a very nice variety.  The beginning of the movie could have been ironed out and the villains could have been more interesting, but this movie has definitely got it going on.

 8/10: Really Good