DUNGEONS & DRAGONS movie poster | ©2023 Paramount Pictures

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head
Writers: Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio, story by Chris McKay & Michael Gilio
Directors: John Francis Daley & Michael Goldstein
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: March 31, 2023

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES is an agreeable and inventive, if slightly long (at two hours and fourteen minutes), fantasy adventure. The film is based, more or less, on the “fantasy tabletop role-playing game” (thank you, Wikipedia) first published in 1974 by its creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and played in various forms around the world ever since.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES honors the game’s basics. A group, consisting of the sorts of characters popular within the rulebooks, comes together on a quest. Our heroes are the former-harper-turned-master-thief rogue Edgin (Chris Pine), human warrior Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), self-doubting half-elf magician Simon (Justice Smith), and shapeshifting Wild Shape Doric (Sophia Lillis). They are joined for a time by the noble and very literal-minded Paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page).

Edgin and Holga have spent two years in a dungeon, having been betrayed during a heist by con man Forge (Hugh Grant) and the sorceress Sofina (Daisy Head). Once free, Edgin finds that Forge has actually conned and magicked his way into being ruler of a kingdom – and is raising Edgin’s now-teen daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) to believe that her father deliberately abandoned her.

The main quest starts out being about prying Kira from Forge’s clutches, but (as these magical quests tend to do) winds up with much more far-reaching stakes.

Directors John Francis Daley & Michael Goldstein, who wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio, based on a story by Chris McKay & Gilio, mostly maintain a decent balance between delivering on thrills and keeping the tone slightly tongue-in-cheek.

While production values are high, there is a sense that the filmmakers are going for providing both the type of story that gamers envision when they’re playing and something of the flavor of gaming itself. To this end, crowd scenes look a bit more Ren Faire than period, and songs performed by bards sound like what we’d hear at such gatherings.

Audience participation is impossible, of course, but Pine’s character seems to be singled out as the audience surrogate, who has knowing quips and a dungeon master’s grasp of a campaign. All of the questers save Page are played by American actors, but Pine is the only one who sounds distinctively from the U.S. – again, this may be because his Edgin has been singled out to be the standard-bearer for what seems intended as the avatar of male American gamers. Smith adopts a working-class English accent, while Rodriguez, Lillis, and Coleman go for a classic mid-Atlantic sound.

They all mesh together well enough to earn our goodwill. Most of the jokes land, and a lot of the magical action is pretty cool – hats off to the owl-bear. It helps that the non-romantic friendly chemistry between Pine and Rodriguez works, and that she is credibly the kickass power to his brainy klutz.

Grant appears to be having wicked fun in putting his customary charm to dark purposes, and Head is quite believably vexed by what fools these mortals be.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES never does anything truly surprising, but it has a lot of energy and enough craft and love for its genre to keep it entertaining.

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