Among: Good Company

I'm not always at the leading edge of the popular new movies at the movie theater. (The comforts of streaming movies at home are just so damn appealing!) But I do try to take note when the masses -- and particularly my friends -- proclaim something good, and try to circle back around to it on a delay of a few months. That's what I did recently with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I must admit that it's been a long (long, long) time since playing Dungeons & Dragons was a regular part of my life. That helped lower my expectations here, as did the terrible D&D movie released in 2000. But friends and online reviewers alike were all united on this new movie: it's actually good, they declared! And you know what? They were right.

Honor Among Thieves is doing the same kind of thing that the Willow TV show recently did. Both realized that fantasy was taking itself awfully damn seriously these days, and that a lighter, even occasionally irreverent tone might be a welcome breath of fresh air. Well... you can't watch Willow anymore, as Disney+ removed it from their service for a tax break (yuck), but thankfully you can stream this movie -- which in my view hits closer to the bullseye of this "light, fun fantasy" target anyway.

It helps that this movie has drawn a more talented cast than you'd ever expect it to have. This may be the furthest possible thing from a hot take, but Chris Pine is an incredibly charismatic actor with a keen intuition for how not to take himself too seriously. Putting him at the center of this movie would have been enough; the casting director could have called it a job well done. But the movie also has Michelle Rodriguez, the perfect "straight man" for a comedy duo (who is strong with fight choreography as well). It has Hugh Grant using his charm for evil as the the villain. There's Sophia Lillis, proving Stephen King's It was not a one-off (though some of us already knew that). I imagine Bridgerton fans are happy to see Regé-Jean Page doing "Airplane" style humor here (being funny because he's too serious). And Justice Smith is key to a heartfelt subplot in the script -- which is smart enough to know this movie can't be all funny all the time.

I really wasn't here for the Dungeons & Dragons references specifically, but I was delighted at how many more were stuffed in here than I even would have imagined. Rattle off five classic monsters from the role-playing game, and odds are at least four of those appear in here somewhere. Your favorite module or PC game set in the D&D system? That probably gets name-checked too. This script (by directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, along with Michael Gilio) gets away with its light-hearted mirth because you can sense a love of the source material at every turn.

I kind of sat down to watch this thinking it couldn't actually be as good as people were saying. But truly, it was -- just a fun fantasy romp. I give Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a B+. If you're reading this and you haven't seen it, I can say with near certainty that it's "for you" and you should check it out.