With John Wick: Chapter 4 out in the wild, the next big blockbuster on deck is Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the fantasy heist action comedy that – if the 90 percent critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes is any indication – is exactly as great as that genre combination sounds.
Based on the tabletop role-playing game of the same name, the ensemble cast is led by Chris Pine, who portrays Edgin Darvis, an adventuring bard who finds himself in prison after one of his heists gets foiled. Quickly finding himself surrounded by other like-minded colleagues, Edgin and his new party set off on a quest to retrieve an ancient relic, which comes with about as many fire-breathing, sharp-fanged, arrow-slinging obstacles as one would imagine.
By all accounts, we can expect a particularly endearing show from Pine and co., with many a critic pointing to its uplifting emotional core and spirited ethos as two of the film’s biggest pillars. According to Edgin Darvis himself in an interview with Variety, it’s pure cinematic medicine.
“What I loved about it is I felt it was just really honest, it was sweet; and I think sweet’s gotten a bad rap, because everything has to be really cool nowadays, and I’m really over “cool.” I want something that’s genuine. The world is so sh*tty, so why not use this vehicle of big-budget cinema to make people feel better?”
If writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were going for cinematic sweetness, they couldn’t have picked a better IP to delve into, but just as much credit needs to be given to the sincerity with which they’ve approached it. A game of Dungeons & Dragons is prime real estate for unparalleled good vibes, but adapting the property into a movie also sets up the trap of falling into cheap meta-humor, given the nature of the game itself. But by the looks of it, the creative duo rolled a natural 20 on checking for those traps, and the end result has more than paid off with critics and audiences alike.
Published: Mar 27, 2023 02:39 am