“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” - A campaign worth playing.

The last serious attempt at a Dungeons & Dragons movie was in 2000, resulting in a critical and commercial bomb (10% on Rotten Tomatoes, grossing just $33.8 million on a $45 million budget) and a legion of angry dungeon masters. Impossibly, two direct-to-DVD sequels were filmed and released in 2005 and 2012, presumably as a prank on nerds. Now that Stranger Things has helped to rehabilitate the image of Dungeons & Dragons, Hollywood decided to roll its twenty-sided dice on another serious attempt at bringing D&D to the silver screen.

The reason Hollywood wants another go at a Dungeons & Dragons film (and potential franchise) is the built-in audience of tens of millions of current D&D players. The tightrope Hollywood must walk is not pissing all over those players’ game the way the 2000 movie emptied its bladder on them. In a sign of good faith, Paramount Pictures and Entertainment One spent $151 million to ensure Honor Among Thieves respects those players and their beloved game. For that amount of money, Honor Among Thieves should be a campaign for the ages.

Since I have played exactly no games of D&D, I cannot tell if the movie satisfies D&D fans with its fan service components. For that matter, I’m not even sure which components are purely fan service. The amount I know about D&D can fit comfortably in a thimble. Whoops - that’s a Monopoly reference. See what I mean? But it looked and sounded like there were a ton of winks and nods to fans. The film’s heroes reference past campaigns and locations and individuals at a furious pace. As little as I know, even I recognized the name Baldur’s Gate, though I haven’t the foggiest idea how or why. And of course, there are dungeons and there are dragons.

Thanks to Stranger Things, I am at least familiar with the basic structure of every D&D campaign. A dungeon master acts as storyteller and host to a party of adventurers who go on a quest. In Honor Among Thieves, Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) acts as the dungeon master, though he is also one of the adventurers. Throughout the film, Edgin provides exposition and back story while also gathering a party to complete his personal campaign. I assume this is a good thing and mirrors other campaigns because Edgin pretty much never stops talking.

The main quest is Edgin reuniting his family. He seeks a tablet that can be used to resurrect his murdered wife and must also convince his estranged daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) to come home with him. The very short backstory is Edgin became a thief after the death of his wife, culminating in his arrest and imprisonment and Kira becoming a ward of the Lord of Neverwinter, Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant). Forge was part of Edgin’s original party that attempted to steal the tablet, Forge betraying Edgin with the help of a Red Wizard named Sofina (Daisy Head) and taking the tablet, along with a bunch of treasure for himself. I promise that really is the short version and would sound a lot cooler if you imagine me wearing a robe, holding a staff, and waving my arms around theatrically.

The party Edgin assembles for the quest sounds as D&D as one can imagine. There is a barbarian named Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), a paladin named Xenk Yendar (Rege-Jean Page), a sorcerer named Simon Aumar (Justice Smith), and a shapeshifting druid named Doric (Sophia Lillis). They’re all part of guilds or descended from someone important and each has a special talent that is required for them to complete the quest. If you have questions about them, just be patient. Edgin will explain everything and everyone.

Like any good quest, the adventurers must first find a couple of special items before they can confront the final boss. These little side quests are what makes this movie fun. One quest leads them to a graveyard and some fun laughs. Another leads them to an underground city filled with action and a fat dragon. If this is what a real-life D&D campaign looks like, I’ve been missing out.

Like any action movie with this many moving parts, there are flaws. Sofina is underdeveloped and her motivation is very generic. The conclusion includes a component that is far too predictable. And Xenk and Doric are underused, especially Xenk, who just leaves them after a side quest. Fortunately, the rest of the movie is strong enough to prevent these flaws from impacting the overall product.

While Honor Among Thieves isn’t so great it makes me want to get into LARPing, it was good enough that I want there to be a sequel. Maybe even play a game or two. I quite enjoyed the story and performances. The actors were clearly enjoying themselves, even Michelle Rodriguez who in most movies appears to be pissed off at someone or something just off screen. It’s a very entertaining film that understands what it is, but doesn’t lean so far into it that falls into a pile of Funyuns in its mom’s basement. The roll of the dice came up favorably.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back or you’ll anger the dungeon master.

“F9” - Dumb a thousand times.

F9 is one the dumbest movies I have ever seen. It was so dumb, rather than waste brain cells and precious time thinking about this travesty, I considered just writing the word “dumb” one thousand times and calling it a review. That is what this movie deserves. But, the entire franchise is that stupid and I have somehow never managed to screen one of these movies in the past. Considering people still plunk down billions of dollars of their hard-earned money for every subsequent movie in the franchise, it felt like a cop out to write dumb, dumb, dumb, etc. So, here goes.

(SPOILER ALERT - This movie will kill some of your brain cells and it will hurt.)

Full disclosure: Of this entire insipid franchise, I have seen the first and eighth films, as well as the spinoff Hobbs and Shaw. I tried to watch the fifth one on a flight once and I lasted about five minutes before I prayed for the oxygen masks to deploy. I have missed them for a variety of reasons, one of which was probably because I was washing my hair. And don’t think it’s for film snob reasons. The entire franchise is the equivalent of Days of Our Lives slipping a roofie to Grand Theft Auto. No amount of car stunts can make up for the terrible acting, beyond-cartoonish plots, atrocious music, and cringeworthy dialogue.

I knew going in that F9 was going to be hot garbage; I was just hoping it would be entertaining from an action movie standpoint. And it was very much not entertaining. There were parts where I laughed out loud, not because something intentionally funny happened, but because something so mind-numbingly stupid was said or done that my brain had to make my body do something. As an example, in the climax, they turn a Pontiac Fiero into a space ship by doing nothing more than attaching a rocket engine to it. My friend, who has seen every movie in the franchise, kept turning to me and saying, “Okay, this one really is pretty bad.” There were even kids talking during the film and I did not care at all, whereas usually I’m plotting their murders.

Again, I went into the film just wanting to shut off my brain for two hours to watch action-packed nonsense, but F9 just wasn’t having it. I’ve seen lazy movies, but this movie took laziness to whole new levels. For much of the run time, it kept reminding the audience how dumb this movie was. Early on, Tyrese Gibson’s character (Roman) is surrounded by fourteen bad guys with machine guns, including some in an elevated position. All of them empty their magazines at him and he not only kills them all, but exits completely unscathed. He then proceeds to spend the rest of the movie trying to convince two of his friends that they might be invincible by pointing out how they should all be dead. I half expected the cast of Lost to wander on screen to point out that the Torettos and friends actually are all dead, which is why they continue to have elaborate spy missions despite starting out as DVD/VCR thieves (incidentally, the first film in the franchise has aged exceptionally badly).

Since the movie decided to indulge in discount Deadpool theater, nothing prohibited it from reining in completely ridiculous and wholly unbelievable action sequences, papered over by a plot not even Dom’s mother could love. Not only were Dom (Vin Diesel) and friends surviving things that should have turned them to jelly or human popsicles or swiss cheese, but they weren’t even getting scratched in the process. Not only were they doing things with vehicles that would make Bugs Bunny blush, the vehicles were usually still functioning despite surviving stunts so absurd they could only be accomplished with CGI. Not only were Dom and team not dying on multiple occasions, but they were even bringing dead characters back to life by talking it away by saying Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) is “really good at making people look dead.”

By now, I would normally have spent some time on the plot, but it really was just dumb on top of stupid on top of much more dumb. Something about magnets and a MacGuffin and a human MacGuffin and a green ball thing with a computer virus that is going to destroy the world unless two dipshits in a space-Fiero drive into an orbiting satellite. It’s the kind of dumb that puts Harry and Lloyd to shame. Suffice it to say, I was not entertained. F9 is the kind of movie that makes you think that maybe Covid lockdowns aren’t so bad. Just so dumb.

Rating: Seriously - just so, so dumb. Yeah, I’m talking to you if you paid to see this film.