Film Review: the new Dungeons & Dragons adventure is terrific

Regé-Jean Page plays Xenk and Jason Wong plays Dralas in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

• Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves 
• ★★★★☆

Movie adaptations of board games haven’t always been a roaring success – for every Clue (1985) there’s a Battleship (2012) or the original Dungeons & Dragons (2000). Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (12A) might be the best movie ever adapted from a board game, and largely because it doesn’t take its source material too seriously. 

Justice Smith plays Simon, Chris Pine plays Edgin, Sophia Lillis plays Doric and Michelle Rodriguez plays Holga in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The story opens with the lute-playing spy-turned-thief Edgin (Chris Pine) and his accomplice Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) executing a daring escape from prison, although their plans to reunite with their former comrade Forge (Hugh Grant) are nipped in the bud when Forge, who has recently come into possession of a kingdom with the help of the sorceress Sofina (Daisy Head), proves unwilling to share his ill-gotten gains, or even release Edgin’s daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) back into his care. 

Determined to win his daughter back, Edgin sets out on an epic quest to source a magical power that will defeat Forge and Sofina...

Hugh Grant plays Forge in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Written by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio, with Goldstein and Daley directing, Honour Among Thieves is a fast-paced farce that establishes its irreverent tone from the very beginning, when Edgin relates his tragic ‘backstory’ to the prison parole board, an account of ‘grand larceny and skulduggery’ laced with knowing asides about classic tales of derring-do. 

The effect is similar to that achieved by The Princess Bride (1987), say – a stonking yarn of magic, monsters and sorcery that sends itself up even as it delivers a supercharged variation on the fairytale epic. 

Sophia Lillis plays Doric in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The performances are good too, with Chris Pine playing his ludicrously unheroic thief as if auditioning for the part of Hamlet, while Michelle Rodriguez is uncompromisingly stone-faced as the one-woman army Holga (Hugh Grant is Hugh Grant, of course, although just a touch more sinister than usual as he delivers his foppish schtick). 

Subversively funny, delightfully eccentric, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is terrific entertainment. (cinema release)