Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is the best fantasy film in years, a warm, funny, and technically stunning adventure that earns every moment.
From the Author
High fantasy has not been well served by the theatrical format in the streaming era. The genre's demands, practical world-building, ensemble dynamics that reward patience, the specific pleasure of watching a group of competent people apply their distinct abilities to a shared problem, map more naturally onto the episodic structure of prestige television than onto the two-hour feature. When high fantasy films do arrive, they tend to either collapse under the weight of their own exposition or compensate by stripping the genre to its most elemental action-adventure components. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves does neither. It is the most purely enjoyable fantasy film produced in many years, a film that trusts its tone completely, executes its premise with real technical craft, and understands that the emotional center of the best fantasy is not world-ending stakes but personal stakes that happen to be taking place in a world you want to spend time in.
The marketing for the film is a minor act of misdirection worth addressing. The trailers suggested a story about a world-ending cataclysm caused by the heroes' misplaced trust, which is not what the film is. What it is is a story about a father, Edgin (Chris Pine), trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) after two years in prison, with a supporting ensemble whose own personal investments in the mission generate the film's most sustained dramatic and comic energy. The Red Wizard Sofina (Daisy Head) and the corrupt lord Forge (Hugh Grant) are antagonists, but the film's emotional engine is entirely in the group of people trying to get Edgin's daughter back. Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), Simon (Justice Smith), and Doric (Sophia Lillis) round out the party, with Regé-Jean Page appearing in a role the film uses with exactly the right comedic timing.
The comedy is the film's most consistent achievement and the most difficult thing it pulls off. The humor is embedded in character rather than delivered as asides, and the film manages the tonal balance between stakes and comic deflation with a precision that most genre films abandon one side of prematurely. The sequence involving a resurrection spell that allows Edgin to question a series of recently dead people for five seconds each is both the film's funniest set piece and the one that most clearly demonstrates the writing's understanding of how game mechanics can generate narrative comedy without breaking dramatic immersion. No joke undercuts a scene that needed to be taken seriously and no serious scene is undercut by a joke that arrived too early.
The final confrontation between the party and Sofina is the film's clearest argument for why the fantasy genre benefits from ensemble storytelling. Each character's specific ability is required, the fight is staged with spatial clarity and escalating complication, and the resolution arrives through collective ingenuity rather than through any single character's power level. Compare this to the third act of most superhero and fantasy films, in which the ensemble resolves to a protagonist-versus-antagonist physical confrontation while everyone else provides moral support. Honor Among Thieves treats the party as the story's actual protagonist, and the film is more emotionally satisfying for it.
The effects and sound design are worth the theatrical experience, and the world-building is accomplished with a confident economy that the genre rarely achieves in a single film. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is worth watching in a theater and is one of the most rewatchable films of 2023.
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