Where’s the nerdiness in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves? When your crew of fantasy thieves is led by Lety from the Fast & Furious series and the erstwhile Captain Kirk/Wonder Woman’s boyfriend – yes, from other nerd properties, but not a very nerdy character in them – it doesn’t immediately make one think of hit points and 12-sided dice. Sure, Hollywood has followed the money and gone full nerd in recent years, as evidenced by Comic Con and all the cosplay it entails becoming the most important event on the industry calendar. But just as The Simpsons’ Mo Szyslak was “ugly ugly” rather than “TV ugly,” Hollywood wants “sexy nerds,” not “nerd nerds.”

However, without someone pushing glasses higher up the bridge of his nose, metaphorically speaking, the latest attempt to reboot Dungeon & Dragons as a cinematic franchise is lacking what would distinguish it from the many other effects-laden blockbusters around it. True to its name, we do start out in a dungeon (a really cool looking dungeon) and there will be a dragon (a really overweight dragon) before all is said and done. But they needed to make the dragon dumpy to distinguish it, which just demonstrates it being up against a plentiful recent history of fire-breathers on the big and small screen – and more generally, a large quantity of similar escapists entertainments.

The fact that comedy was Paramount’s desired focus shows in its choice of two comedy writer-directors at the helm. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were the directors of the very well received Game Night in 2018, and before that, the underrated Vacation reboot. They’ve got an ideal comedic persona to front this enterprise in Chris Pine, but whether comedy is the ideal mode for the film version of a game that its players take extremely seriously is up for debate.

Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard and one-time member of the Harpers, an organisation of peacekeepers. His selfless heroism has transformed into cynicism and thievery after the death of his wife at the hands of a red wizard he helped apprehend. That led him to take up with a band of thieves including warrior Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), fledgling sorcerer Simon Auman (Justice Smith) and rogue Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant), who actually find themselves on a comparatively honourable “one last mission” when Edgin and Holga are caught in a miscast time spell by Forge’s acquaintance Sofina (Daisy Head). That leaves them in the dungeon where we find them at the beginning, two years into their sentence, unable to return to Edgin’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman). That’s especially troubling because Edgin was attempting to steal a resurrection tablet that might bring his wife back to life, though Kira assumed it was just another soulless quest for riches.

Staging a bold escape from a tribunal where they were actually about to be granted freedom, Edgin and Holga trace Kira to where she’s living with Forge, now the lord of a city called Neverwinter. (The name of this city, the use of maps in the opening credits, and the presence of dragons are not the only things that will remind you of Game of Thrones.) He has the tablet, but he’s not too eager to part with it, and has been feeding lies to Kira about her father. Plus his chief adviser is Sofina, who is actually a red wizard herself and in league with those who killed Edgin’s wife. Edgin will need to reassemble what remains of the old crew, plus a shapeshifter named Doric (Sophia Lillis), if he wants to clear his name, reclaim the tablet and escape the various bounties on his head.

It’s a shame that Honour Among Thieves does feel derivative of other entertainment properties, because Dungeons & Dragons the role-playing game undoubtedly got there first. (Well, first after J.R.R. Tolkien, anyway.) Both Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe and the aforementioned Game of Thrones have had recent television reboots, so there really is little new we’re seeing in Honour Among Thieves.

Fortunately, that doesn’t preclude it being entertaining, and this appealing cast is a virtual guarantee of that. Not only do you have Pine’s charm, Rodriguez’ badassery and Lillis’ plucky intensity, but you’ve got Grant continuing to savour the period of his career where he’s been envisioned primarily as a villain. Little of what comes out of their mouths produces laughs, a noted disappointment of Goldstein and Daley’s dialogue (which they wrote with Michael Gilio). The lightness of tone itself, though, fills the laughter void with contagious good cheer.

This brand lost ground by lying low while other fantasy properties ascended, meaning few of the creatures or landscapes conjured here awaken any awe in us. Honour Among Thieves makes up for some of this, though, with the way it orchestrates its set pieces. The most memorable of these involves a magical device called a hither thither staff, which allows the one who wields it to create portals on any two surfaces the wielder can physically see at the time they’re using it. The way the staff’s attributes are used in one particular heist is pretty ingenious in how it incorporates the rules established around it, including its limitations. The writers may not show their previous talent for humour in the dialogue, but their cleverness shines through by establishing the details of this world and utilising them in pushing the plot forward.

Obviously weekend larpers and other assorted fantasy nuts will flock to Dungeon & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, and they’ll celebrate the existence of the movie enough to squelch their inner pedant, who’s probably only too eager to nitpick the incorrect details and the way the movie sells out to the mainstream. It’s that mainstream, though, that will determine if there will be other Dungeons & Dragons movies. Paramount is rolling the 12-sided die that it will, and somewhere within the series of compromises is a reasonably enjoyable film.

 

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is currently playing in cinemas.