Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feature movie review 

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• Paramount Pictures

The aspect of Dungeons & Dragons as a game that has made it so compelling for nearly 50 years is exactly the thing that makes it a tricky translation as cinematic intellectual property. Unlike comic books, best-sellers or even video games like Super Mario Bros. or Hitman, Dungeons & Dragons doesn't come equipped with familiar characters or settings; the protagonist of that game is ... well, you, and the setting is ... well, wherever you want it to be. There are no catch-phrases to inspire chuckles of recognition, no canon to provide points of narrative attachment. Beyond some basic game-play rules, there's simply infinite space for imagination. For folks gathering around a table, that's a feature; for any potential movie version, it's a little bit of a bug.

The writer/director team of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (Game Night, the Ed Helms Vacation remake) might not initially seem like the ideal filmmakers for a fantasy spectacle, but that would be thinking about a Dungeons & Dragons adaptation in the wrong way. A fundamental component of the game is that it takes on the personality of the Dungeonmaster, the one who's guiding the players through the story. And by that measure, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a feature that absolutely delivers a D&D adventure after the creators' own hearts.

Because this is, first and foremost, an energetic and delightful comedy, albeit one that happens to include plenty of CGI stuff. At its core, it's a simple quest narrative: Edgin (Chris Pine), a thief recently escaped from prison with his long-time partner-in-crime Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), needs to recover his daughter (Chloe Coleman) from one-time colleague Forge (Hugh Grant), along with a magical artifact that could revive Edgin's dead wife. Unfortunately, Forge has teamed up with a powerful wizard (Daisy Head) for nefarious purposes, requiring Edgin to seek assistance from insecure mage Simon (Justice Smith), shape-shifter Doric (Sophia Lillis) and paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page).

The adventuring party with a mission certainly sets up a basic D&D scenario, including recognizable types like the fighter, the magic-user, the thief and so on. Daley and Goldstein understand how to employ some of the tropes of the game—a magical item isn't really a magical item unless it comes with a moniker like "Helmet of Disjunction"—but they're not interested in leaning into that stuff too heavily. If it's important to you that you get an appearance by a halfling or a dwarf, so be it, you'll find it. And if it's not important to you, you're not getting drowned in a sea of stuff that only veteran players would appreciate.

Instead, Daley and Goldstein are committed to the much more universal language of comedy, which they speak fluently. In part, that comes from casting deft performers like Pine, Smith and Grant for their ability to bend a line with just a little extra something; Grant in particular continues to shine as he embraces the "playing an absolute bastard" phase of his career. The action sequences aren't always bursting with kinetic energy, but they're playful and satisfying because the filmmakers understand that characters fighting a dragon has been done to death, and it's more interesting if you make the dragon in question a total chonky boi. And in particular, they get remarkable mileage out of a sequence in which our heroes try to extract vital information from reanimated corpses, struggling to nail the specificity of the "only five and exactly five" questions for each undead warrior.

I'm not convinced that Honor Among Thieves succeeds at its attempt to find an emotional hook in the idea of Edgin's group as a makeshift family; if there's one thing that long-time D&D players know, it's that the characters questing together don't necessarily have to like or trust one another. Nor is it always a seamless melding of the filmmakers' goofy sensibility and the seemingly-obligatory 21st-century blockbuster stakes of a villain with megalomaniacal designs. It is, however, tremendous fun nearly from start to finish. No one here had to worry about nerds griping about the casting. They just got to share a unique adventure with those willing to play along in the universe of their creation. If that's not D&D in movie form, I don't know what is.