Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves follows a crew of criminals, including Chris Pine’s Edgin Darvis and Michelle Rodriguez’s Holga Kilgore, as they set out to retrieve a magical tablet from Hugh Grant’s Forge Fitzwilliam. There’s little doubt, ultimately, that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves fares best in its briskly-paced and somewhat promising opening stretch, as Goldstein and Daley, working from a script written with Michael Gilio, kick the proceedings off with a tongue-in-cheek first act that boasts several compelling performances and a handful of engaging interludes – with the latter certainly true of a stirring confrontation between Grant’s now-villainous figure and his former cohorts. It’s disappointing to note, then, that the picture segues into an excessively hit-and-miss midsection focused on the heroes’ predominantly tiresome episodic exploits, as the far-from-streamlined atmosphere is compounded by an ongoing emphasis on digressions and set-pieces of a less-than-engrossing nature (eg the protagonists’ encounter with a chubby dragon) – with the arms-length feel perpetuated by Goldstein and Daley’s woeful over-reliance on computer-generated special effects. And although the picture’s admittedly been suffused with a few stirring sequences (eg Sophia Lillis’ Doric shape-shifts into various animals to escape pursuing villains), Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves builds towards a typically exhausting climax that ensures it finishes on just about as underwhelming and interminable a note as one could possibly envision – with the end result a fairly disastrous misfire in desperate need of some serious trimming (ie 134 minutes is just absurd and unreasonable, ultimately).

* out of ****