Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

I nipped into a double bill of Super Mario and Dungeons & Dragons this week; on a rainy school holiday, it was something of a shock to the system to find packed auditoriums and hundreds of kids queued up for every show from 11am onwards. With John Wick 4 hoovering up the adult market, Super Mario keeping the kids and games happy, and Dungeons and Dragons for older families, it’s fair to say that the various quadrants of the multiplex audience are getting catered for again, after a long period of stuttering anxiety, it feels like cinema is finally returning to robust good health.

It’s also fair to say that, after a lamentable 2000 outing for the Dungeons & Dragons IP, not many were enthused at the prospect of a Hasbro reboot, but Paramount’s roll of the multi-sided dice for a big budget, high concept re-think of the board-game actually plays like a decent Saturday matinee of yore. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are better known for black comedies like Game Night, and genre classic The Princess Bride seems to be an irreverent model here; Chris Pine makes a traditionally solid lead as bard Edgin Darvis, introduced to us in, of course, a dungeon.

We backtrack to find out how Darvis got there; feeling responsible for the death of his wife, Darvis has struggled to bring up their daughter, with Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez) helping out as Darvis goes down the path of a common thief along with the wily co-conspirator Forge (Hugh Grant). Forge is a bona-fide con-artist, and manages to trick his way into being a wealthy ruler (‘‘Do you dare are to question how he came to power?’ is a rare political allusion here), becoming Lord of Neverwinter and stealing Darvis’ daughter. A big-scale castle heist is required, with some stealthy sub-missions dredging up various including Regé-Jean Page as a paladin and a cameo from Bradley Cooper as a small man. And of course, there’s dragons too, a very rotund one features.

‘Just because that sentence is symmetrical doesn’t mean it’s not nonsense,’ is an accurate line to sample; the agreeably loquacious nature of the characters makes this as much of a comedy as an adventure, with Grant enjoyably hamming it up in panto as he did in Paddington 2. A scene with a set of corpses with can be revived to answer five questions is also funny in the patented Monty Python ‘parody of officiousness’ style, and even if the result goes on a bit, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves proves itself to be a cut above most knuckle-headed, thud-and blunder sword and sorcery romps.