Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Is the Most Enjoyable Adventure of 2023
Full disclosure: I grew up on Dungeons & Dragons. I played the RPG in the hallways of our grade school during recess; ran and played in different campaigns in college; and now, as a father of three, occasionally take my family on adventures in the Forgotten Realms and beyond. It would be fair to assume that I’d be biased towards liking Honor Among Thieves, the new movie based on the role-playing game, but a few people might remember that a Dungeons & Dragons movie came out in 2000 and it was, as kids say these days, quite mid.
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So I really wanted Honor Among Thieves to be good. No, I needed it to be good. As a nerd growing up, my head was filled with monsters and magic spells, with a vocabulary expanded through comics and Gary Gygax’ Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks. But in the ’80s, Dungeons & Dragons, like Proctor & Gamble, was tainted with the stigma of Satanic panic. And why not? There were demons right along with the dragons, and clerics—fighting priests—prayed to different gods for their power. D&D was a game played by the kids who skipped gym class and weren’t very popular in school. The ’80s weren’t very kind to nerds.
It’s different now. These days, thanks in large part to the success of Stranger Things, playing Dungeons & Dragons is no longer just normal, it’s actually cool. People are wearing Eddie’s Hellfire Club shirt unironically and terms like Demogorgon, Mind Flayer, and even Vecna are now part of everybody’s lexicon.
These days, it’s pretty great to be a nerd. Between all the comic book movies and television series based on fantasy and science fiction novels, nerds are on top of the world. And now there’s Dungeons & Dragons, a movie based on a game we played mostly in our heads using pencils, paper with weird numbers scribbled on them, and dice of different shapes and sizes.
The good news is that Honor Among Thieves doesn’t need you to know a single thing about Dungeons & Dragons. It’s an absolutely solid story about a man (Chris Pine) and his best friend (Michelle Rodriguez) on a mission to rescue his daughter (Chloe Coleman) from their former associate (Hugh Grant) and stop a former employer (Daisy Head) from doing a bad, bad thing. They bring an old friend (Justice Smith) for the ride, meet new ones (Sophia Lillis, Regé-Jean Page), and save the day. It’s a pretty simple, accessible story that just happens to have a few dungeons and the occasional dragon.
Few movies tick the boxes as fully as Honor Among Thieves, with equal amounts of humor and heart, action and introspection, and world-building and spectacle.
Well, it’s mostly just one dragon. But he’s big, fat, and rolls around like a giant cat and tries to hop on subterranean bridges the way munchkins try and fail to jump on cabinets. It’s as adorable and funny as it’s terrifying and Themberchaud the chonk dragon would totally kill it on TikTok with fat cat-style videos. The entire sequence with a gravitationally challenged dragon in the Underdark is immensely entertaining but it’s just one chapter of an adventure that’s a truly wild ride from start to finish.
Honor Among Thieves is effortlessly fun and fresh and a much-needed change of pace from the glut of superhero movies that teeter dangerously close to formulaic. This isn’t to say Dungeons & Dragons is completely original. Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley mine familiar tropes and story beats so there’s a fair amount of predictability but they manage to tell the story in a way that still feels refreshingly new. At the same time, it’s also endearingly familiar for anyone who’s ever played a D&D campaign. Even though no prior knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons is necessary to enjoy the film, Goldstein and Daley have loaded the story with so many references and Easter eggs for all the nerds, from mentions of Elminster (the Forgotten Realms’ version of Gandalf) to the use of actual spells from the Players Handbook to the appearance of popular monsters like Displacer Beasts and Gelatinous Cubes.
Goldstein, Daley, and co-writer Michael Gilio somehow manage to make the film feel like an organic tabletop adventure; every single character is believable and relatable with motivations and backstories like actual D&D player characters. Rodriguez’s Holga Kilgore has a peculiar quirk with her romantic interests that is absolutely hilarious on every level, including an unexpected cameo. Smith’s awkward sorcerer Simon has low self-esteem, which directly impacts his ability to utilize magic. Page plays the paladin Xenk completely straight and humorless, pretty much as one would expect a self-righteous holy warrior to be and the result is comedic perfection. It’s little touches like this that add even more color to a well thought out setting.
Just like a tabletop adventure where players pull off impossible feats in unexpected ways, Honor Among Thieves manages to succeed as a truly entertaining film for audiences who know nothing about D&D and as a really satisfying, validating experience for every single nerd who’s ever rolled a 20-sided die. Few movies tick the boxes as fully as Honor Among Thieves, with equal amounts of humor and heart, action and introspection, and world-building and spectacle. The film treats the source material with the same respect it does its audience, and at no point does it feel like there’s too much going on to follow.
It’s the perfect family adventure because, after all, what are families but real-world analogs of adventuring parties? Every family has its leaders in much the way Pine’s bard and the Rodriguez’s barbarian are the parents while Simon and Illis’ badass druid Doric are the kids (Xenk is like the unfun older cousin that always tells you, ‘no.’). The dynamic is familiar, so all the characters’ relationships feel organic and relatable. Even Hugh Grant’s smarmy Forge Fitzwilliam is so charming and funny that you will love him almost as much as you’ll hate him—basically, the perfect rogue. Doric, one of the coolest characters, does a Hulk vs Loki homage while in owlbear form that audiences will recognize and enjoy. We need more stories like Honor Among Thieves, lighthearted, family-oriented fun that isn’t just more superheroes.
We need more stories like Honor Among Thieves, lighthearted, family-oriented fun that’s isn’t just more superheroes.
Really, major studios like Disney and Warner Bros Discovery should slow down on all the superhero stuff. Even all the Star Wars on Disney+ feels like there’s just too much of it, although Andor was brilliant. What we really need is more Dungeons & Dragons, not even necessarily with Esquire cover-gracing Chris Pine or any of the other characters from Honor Among Thieves, although a potential sequel would sound great. There is an infinitude of stories that can be told with a game that literally has millions of players forging their own adventures at home.
This is truly what sets Dungeons & Dragons apart from other franchises like the MCU or Harry Potter or Star Wars. While there are various canon worlds and stories that can be found in all the books that have ever been published (such as the much beloved Dragonlance Chronicles by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis), the most magical thing about D&D is that its core audience has lived these adventures themselves. That’s why even though Honor Among Thieves is set in the canon Forgotten Realms, with familiar locations like Neverwinter or the Underdark, all the characters are completely new and made for the movie, so it feels exactly like a home campaign.
Dungeons & Dragons is also as inclusive and representational as it gets. Even though Edgin is a cishet white male, their party consists of a dark-skinned female barbarian, a dark-skinned half-elf, and a tiefling redhead (a growing minority in comic book movies). The D&D world is one where Jonathan the Aarakocra (guaranteed to be everyone’s favorite minor character), a giant walking bird, stands shoulder to shoulder, figuratively, with three foot tall halflings and furry cat people.
If major studios want diversity, Dungeons & Dragons has it baked right in. Character diversity is literally what makes every adventure work. More than the Avengers or the Justice League, the heroes of every Dungeons & Dragons story look and act completely different, almost by necessity. Just like the game, the characters of stories set in a D&D world can be anyone and anything you want them to be. Edgin, Holga, Simon, Doric, as well as Forge and Xenk are just the tip of the iceberg, and that might be one of the most exciting things about the film. Honor Among Thieves is so entertaining that families need to go on an adventure to the theaters and see it today.
