Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Finally!

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

4 / 5

Bona fides: I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since 1980. So there. With that out of the way, let’s get into this. D&D has been wandering in the cinematic wilderness for a long time. Nobody has really been able to get the game onto the screen in any kind of satisfying way, for one main reason that I want to try explaining here in as accessible a way as possible. The core of any role-playing game is what is called the game mechanics, or engine. This is the math of the game (including the random chance element of dice) that allows the game to model reality on paper. It’s what allows RPGs to avoid the old kids-playing-cops-and-robbers trap where players don’t have an objective way to determine the success of a task, so they argue (Bang, you’re dead! Nuh-uh, you missed!) until everybody gets mad and goes home. In a game, carefully balanced math mechanics are important, accepted, and don’t cause much trouble. Movies, though, don’t have objective limits, and we’ve all seen fantasy movies (cough Marvel cough) where the heroes have powers that they say have limits, but in practice are extremely elastic; the script-writers fudge details all the time to justify whatever they need the hero to be able to do. Any “D&D movie” has to figure out how to square this circle (a game’s defined limits translating to a film, a format that willfully evades them). Previous attempts have tried to enforce the game’s limits, and ended up limp and weird. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves chooses the cinematic path. It does not “follow the rules” very closely; game purists will unconsciously create lists of all the stuff the movie “gets wrong.” This is a sacrifice I find worth making, because it sets up what the movie gets dead right (if you’ll forgive the pun that will become clear in a moment). 

Maybe a third of the way through the film, the crew of heroes finds themselves facing a puzzle. They need a magic helmet (because reasons) and the only way to find its location is to interrogate the long dead warriors buried on a historic battlefield (this is what’s happening in the picture above). They have a magic token that lets them ask five questions to a corpse about things that happened while it was alive, and any given corpse can only ever be “used” this way once. They come to realize, however, that not every corpse has the information they want. What follows is a puzzle montage sequence where they get just enough information from each corpse (“that’s all I know, because then I died”) to lead them to another specific corpse, while lightly teasing each other about stupid questions along the way. They end up questioning five or six corpses before finally piecing together the information they need. This sequence exactly captures the social essence of the game: a group of players putting their heads together to work through a puzzle posed to them by a “Dungeon Master” who knows the solution and will give out clues when asked the right questions. 

This is the film’s success, and why I can recommend it to both longtime players and curious onlookers: it respectfully captures the game experience. A D&D table is full of silly jokes and snacks and a good time (and sometimes a little deus ex machina), with players experiencing successes and setbacks as they attempt to collaboratively solve a series of puzzles and challenges, with a heroic goal on the line (like “save the city from the evil magical plague”). This movie is that, start to finish. It’s not arch mythmaking, but neither are most RPG campaigns. 

4 stars of 5: I liked it, and would watch it again (both before and after a new player ran through their first adventure).