There seems to be a common thread among people who watch Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves, which is that it’s a lot better than either the marketing campaign or the premise would lead you to believe. As a matter of fact, it’s really quite a good film; not spectacular, but solid, engaging, and creative. Most surprise of all, perhaps, is that it pays a remarkable degree of respect to its source material, even while playing a lot of it for laughs.

In the ‘Forgotten Realms’ setting of Dungeons and Dragons, a pair of ne’er-do-well thieves, Edgin the Bard and Holga the Barbarian (I guess her player had been reading Flannery O’Connor), are up for parole from their arctic prison, giving Edgin a chance to expound at length on their backstory, how he was once a Harper (heroic Bard secret agents), but turned to thieving to try to provide a better life for his family, only to inadvertently draw the undead Red Wizards down on his home, resulting in the death of his beloved wife. He and Holga then teamed up to go-pro on the whole thief gig, joining forces with Simon the Sorcerer, Hugh Grant the Rogue, and Bald-Chick the Wizard. A job to steal an artifact that can resurrect the dead in the hopes of bringing his dead wife back (and thus correcting his mistake) goes south, resulting in Edgin and Holga getting arrested, leaving his daughter, Kira, in the care of Hugh Grant.

Upon completing their backstory, the two thieves proceed to ambush the Aarakoca (bird person) judge and jump out the window with him, using his human-avian abilities to slow their fall and so make good their escape (while missing another judge’s plaintive cries that their parole has been approved). They head down to Neverwinter to find Hugh Grant has taken over the city, sought to turn Edgin’s daughter against him, and subsequently attempts to have them executed. So they hatch a scheme to rescue his daughter and overthrow Hugh Grant via a magical heist, only for that they need a lost magical helmet, and for that they need a team, which consists of Simon the half-elf Sorcerer (whose magic is notably weak and unreliable owing to his massive self-esteem issues) and Doric the half-tiefling Druid (whom I just call Cute Druid), who wants to protect her adoptive people from Hugh Grant’s machinations and has a sort-of history with Simon. Later in the course of their quest they temporarily join up with Xenk the Paladin.

Oh, and Bald Chick the Wizard is actually one of the undead Red Wizards and is plotting something nefarious with Hugh Grant’s aid.

And there’s our set up. Good session everyone; does this time next week work for you all?

All that is a perfectly serviceable set-up for a fantasy adventure; a clear goal (rescue the girl, overthrow the corrupt ruler) which is to be accomplished by collecting a lost magical artifact buried deep in the dragon-infested lava cave all while avoiding the undead evil wizards and their minions. Fortunately, even amidst all the humor, the stakes are always treated seriously enough to prevent the whole thing from dissolving into a farce, and our team of ostensible anti-heroes (all of whom are solidly in the ‘Good’ alignment) get more than one opportunity to be heroic and self-sacrificing and do the right thing.

Actually, that’s one of the more surprising things about the film: Xenk the Paladin is allowed to be a genuine Paladin. He’s not undermined or made into a joke or deconstructed as a ‘holier-than-thou’ jerk; he’s presented as, well, ‘he wost a very gentle Knight’. The first thing we see him doing is rescuing a baby cat-person from a giant fish, without harming either (so, yes, his first move is saving a combination baby and kitten). The next thing we see him do is giving money to a beggar. On top of that, he seems to be several levels above the others and serves as by far their most competent member during his time with them. And perhaps most surprising of all, with all that he’s still allowed a few human touches, like quietly smirking at Edgin’s whispered insults or looking as though he’s exercising every ounce of his self-control to remain calm when one of the team screws up enormously, leaving them with seemingly no way forward. Really, it feels like it’s been a while since I’ve seen a character like this in a piece of western media. He still gets played for laughs, but they’re laughs based on the contrast of his character with the others and how extremely good he is.

The characters in general are, again, perfectly fine and generally likable. Edgin the Bard is a well-meaning guy who tends to over-focus on what he thinks he wants and miss what’s actually in front of him (nicely established in the aforementioned prison break) and has a fine arc where this is brought home to him. His flaw is that he’s self-centered and narrow-focused, not to the point of being unfeeling to others, but more to the point of just not noticing context. And it is refreshing to see Chris Pine in an original role where he gets to let his natural charisma shine without being overshadowed or ill-served by the rest of the film.

Holga the Barbarian seems like she’d be the kind of annoying feminist fantasy character that we’ve all become so painfully familiar with over the years, but…she isn’t really. She’s a tough brawler because that’s her character class, but she has a clear and limited skill set and is otherwise largely characterized by her sense of loneliness and isolation, having left her tribe to marry a Halfling man, only to have her relationship with him fall apart because she couldn’t get over leaving her tribe. It’s a nicely humanizing touch to what could have been a simply one-note character.

Simon the Sorcerer is a little too wimpy for my tastes, though this is kind of the point of his character: his flaw is that he has a critical lack of self-esteem, hampering his spell-casting abilities and, consequently, making him rather limited in use, further damaging his confidence. But this is refreshingly balanced by the fact that he is always able to come through in a crisis, establishing that he isn’t really useless or cowardly, he just thinks he is. He and Edgin serve as one of the core dynamics in the film as Edgin tries to get him to man up and see his own worth. And oh my goodness, I was so glad to see that Simon is actually allowed to rescue the Cute Druid a few times!

Cute Druid herself is a bit more one note than the others; she’s got a straightforward motivation and spends most of her time finding creative ways to use her Wildshape ability (more on that below) while occasionally tossing barbs at the others. Which makes sense; she’s the only one of the four core party members without a prior relationship with the others (well, Simon tried to court her a while back, but it didn’t work out due to his confidence issues and she barely remembers him).

On the subject of Wildshape, Cute Druid gets probably the stand-out action sequence of the film, in which she gets spotted on a scouting mission and has to try to escape, while constantly transforming into different creatures, all done in a single continuous shot (I mean, it’s mostly CG, but it sure looks cool). That’s one of those moments where it really feels like someone involved was genuinely excited by the creative possibilities presented by the premise.

It’s not the only one either, and this is really one of the stand-out elements of the film: unlike a lot of modern blockbusters where it feels like they’re going through the motions and just trying here and there to do something that will get talked about on social media, here the filmmakers tend to get hold of an idea and then try to play with it as much as they can before moving on, if they even have to move on (Wildshape gets spammed throughout, not just in that chase scene).

There’s one scene, for instance, where the characters use a ‘talk to the dead’ spell to interrogate an army of barbarians to try to learn the location of the magic helmet they need for the plot. The rules are carefully laid out that the spell has infinite uses, but you can only ask each corpse five questions and they will not return to death until all five are asked. And they go through just about every complication and joke that you can come up with based on that set-up, from running through the allotted questions through poor word choices (“Did that count as a question?” “Yes.”) to finding corpse after corpse who don’t know anything useful whatever to asking random questions just to kill them off again (“What’s two-plus-two?” “I’m bad at math”). It’s funny, but it’s also, as a I say, an indication of real passion and interest in the premise and all the things that could be done with it.

Which brings us to the big point that kind of ties it all together: the fact that the film feels very much like a real DnD session.

First of all, they stick to the rules of the game surprisingly well. Not perfectly (the Bard and the Druid are both way underpowered for their class, and Wildshape doesn’t work that way from what I understand), but enough that you can see they’re paying attention. Just an example, remember how Simon the Sorcerer’s problem is that his lack of self-esteem gets in the way of his spellcasting? Well, that actually makes perfect in-game sense, since Sorcerers have their spellcasting ability tied to their Charisma stat: the stat of how attractive, outgoing, and confident they are. Likewise all the spells and creatures shown in the film are actual spells and creatures from the game, and as noted the setting is the ‘Forgotten Realms’ setting, complete with several canon characters making cameos.

More than that, though, the way the film plays out and the things the characters do are the sorts of things you’d get in an RPG. Even the opening, where Edgin and Holga stage a daring escape despite already being pardoned is the kind of thing that’s likely to happen when over-eager players jump the gun on a frustrated Dungeon Master. The story is full of things like this; the characters making the wrong moves, improvising unexpected solutions on the fly, briefly derailing the narrative because they misjudged some point or other, having ridiculously bad luck out of nowhere thanks to a bad dice roll, and on and on.

There’s a joke where Simon accidentally triggers a trap destroying the bridge they need to cross, only to find that a random bit of equipment is actually the Forgotten Realms version of the Portal Gun. Which is exactly the kind of last-ditch effort a DM might make to salvage a campaigns after the players have ruined any chance of progressing normally. Likewise some of the character interactions felt to me like hasty improvisations from players who hadn’t quite coordinated their backstories (especially when Simon drops that he used to date Cute Druid, who reacts as if this were completely new information that she just has to roll with).

It’s a little hard to pin down, but all this gives the film a very particular tone that makes it a lot of fun to watch. Again, like the filmmakers were honestly invested in the material and enjoyed working with it.

(I also appreciated that not only did they give the party from the 1983 cartoon a showy cameo – though I wish they had taken a second to confirm they survived the climax – they also included a quick shout-out to the 2000 live-action film with Jeremy Irons: a film most people, and especially Jeremy Irons, probably prefer to forget).

Along with that, the story is pretty decent on its own merits: a solid tale of a man trying to make up for past mistakes. Edgin has a very nice arc as he goes from single-mindedly trying to undo his failures, while simultaneously downplaying his own responsibility for them (as shown by his hatred for the whole race that the Red Wizards come from…of which Xenk is a member) to learning to let go of his own wants in order to see what he has in front of him. The detail that he doesn’t consider that how his daughter views the situation might be different from how he views it is a particularly good touch, given a concrete form to the internal dynamics and making it easy to grasp how he’s gone wrong. I also like that, for all his complaints about him, he ultimately is inspired to imitate Xenk’s heroism.

All that dovetails nicely with Simon’s secondary story of gaining confidence by not stressing so much over what he lacks and comparing himself to his legendary ancestors. Not brilliant stuff, but it works. There’s even a genuinely good inspirational speech about continuing to try in the face of failure (“Once you get tired of failing, you’ve failed”).

It’s also mostly free of the usual modernist nonsense: Edgin gets knocked around a bit, but is a capable leader and his whole motivation is trying to put his family back together. Simon’s a comical wimp, but he’s still allowed to be heroic and, again his story is about gaining confidence (which is even shown to be an attractive trait), and he gets a pretty cool wizard-vs-sorcerer duel at the end (which is amusingly staged like a wild-west duel). I still think he and Cute Druid were a little too much ‘feminine boy, masculine girl’ by the end, but it could have been a lot worse. And any emasculating tendencies are counterbalanced by Xenk the manly Paladin. Even the actual ruler of Neverwinter, who spends most of the film in a magical coma, turns out to be a righteous and just ruler in the end.

On that note, how refreshing is it that the magical parole board turn out to be sympathetic, reasonable people who actually try to do their jobs and give prisoners the benefit of the doubt?

Beyond that, I think the film could have stood to be a bit shorter: it clocks in at 2 hours, 14 minutes, when it seems to me that it probably ought to have stuck to a two-hour limit. There are some scenes or jokes that drag on longer than is really necessary, including, unfortunately, the very first scene, where we get an elaborate, Jurassic-Park-inspired sequence of a hulking orcish prisoner being unloaded and transferred to his cell under extreme maximum security…only to end with Hulga taking him out easily. We don’t need the big lead up; the point is made the moment we see the guy and they could have cut that two-minute sequence down to a handful of scenes to have the same impact. Likewise, Edgin’s backstory seems to me to run on for longer than it needed to. I know talking is a free action, but leanness is a virtue in movies.

(Compare with Puss in Boots: the Last Wish, which had four distinct factions, complete arcs for just about every major character etc., all in less than a hundred minutes).

The backstory also lost me a bit when Edgin says that they had “no way of earning money legitimately.” He’s a bard, she’s a barbarian, and they couldn’t find a way to turn either of those skillsets to profit? I can see that being a throwaway excuse from the character creation, but I’m not gonna give that much slack to the premise. I’m also skeptical that a late-game gambit to get the innocent crowds out of the line of fire would have worked nearly as well as it is shown here (lucky dice roll and a DM who wanted to finish the campaign that night? Or clumsy writing? You decide).

The effects are also kind of hit or miss. The CGI is mostly serviceable, and I appreciate that they used a lot of real locations and animatronics, but the various half-animal people often end up looking like theme-park mascots, and the baby/kitten in particular looks as if it might have begun life in a toy store somewhere (a high-end toy store, but still).

Overall, this is one of those movies that is not great, but remarkable for how much better it is than you would think, and for the simple fact that everyone involved seemed to actually be invested in the material; like a quirky passion project that somehow made it onto the major release roster (it reminds me of Sing in that way). I’m sorry that it didn’t do better in the theaters, but I’d say it’s definitely worth your time if you want a fun, comedic fantasy adventure with some pretty good character stuff thrown in to boot. And if you’re a fan of the game, this is a must-see.

Recommended, especially for fans of the material