After a decade or so of production, Dungeons and Dragons: Honour
Among Thieves has finally released at an interesting time. The film, which is of
course loosely adapting the classic table-top RPG of the same name, finds itself in theatres at the
same time as The Super Mario Bros. movie, a few short weeks after HBO s The Last of Us took the
television world by storm. Game adaptations have perhaps never been so culturally prevalent but
as the mixed reception of the Mario movie, as the online backlash to that reception, and as
a few other projects within recent memory, have demonstrated the question of how to successfully
go about adapting a game, how to translate something from an active medium to a passive one,
remains an open one. And while it certainly hasn t single-handedly closed that question, I think
this new D&D film has maybe come nearer than anything else. It really succeeds as a film, but
more importantly, I think it really succeeds as an adaptation. And paradoxically, this success is due
in large part to the film s focus on failure. To explain that a little, let me tell you a story.
I m not much of a D&D guy myself, but I have played it, or its derivatives, a couple of times
in my life and I still remember my last session quite vividly, because it was a disaster. We
weren t too far into the campaign this was more a preliminary adventure than the main event, I think
but our party s task was to infiltrate a fancy soiree in order to gather some information crucial
to our eventual heist. At first, everything went swimmingly. The dice smiled upon us that
day. But as we were finishing up, some prince or other in the city s royal family was arriving.
Now I was playing an assassin, and this assassin had some sort of tragic backstory,
the details of which elude me this was years ago, mind but part of that backstory was that
my assassin blamed the rich, the powerful, and above all else, the royals, for what had befallen
him. My assassin was only doing any of this to weaken the establishment, to further his own
radical republican mission but, like, Oliver Cromwell style radical republicanism , not
that current brand of white boomer fascist. Anyway, based on the character I d been given?
I had to do something. My other party members just wanted to get out of there, regroup, move
on but I was devoted to the role-playing aspect of the game, damn it, so I decided my character wasn
t leaving the town hall without taking a crack at the prince. I clambered up into the rafters,
took out a vial of poison I d acquired a while back, and rolled to drip a splash
of it into the prince s goblet, far beneath me. That was the moment the dice stopped smiling on
me critical failure. The rafters gave way, and my character fell, poison in hand, to land, injured,
at the feet of the prince and his retinue. Next, I rolled to try and stab the bastard, then and
there. It was a two, or something, and so my guy lost the fight. My party had tried, and failed, to
help, so last? I just rolled to run away. Another freakishly bad number, another critical failure,
and hey presto, the collapsed chandeliers set the wooden floor alight. And so on.
To cut a long, depressing story short, we went from a flawless, undetected victory,
to a burned-down town hall, a city on high alert, and an assassin on death s door. We
never finished that campaign. This was the last year of sixth form, so what with the revision,
the relationships, the underage drinking, time was short, and trying to salvage a campaign I
d royally botched wasn t really at the top of anyone s list of priorities. I wouldn t
have had it any other way, though. That whole mess was, by a country mile, the worst part
of the whole experience but it was also the most memorable, the most fun. It was fun in a peculiar,
unique, haphazard way, a precise way I hadn t felt again, not exactly anyway. That is,
until I saw this film. Dungeons and Dragons:
Honour Among Thieves is all about failure. (clip- DORIC: What is it exactly that you bring to this?
EDGIN: I m a planner, I make plans DORIC: You ve already made the plan, so ?
EDGIN: If the existing plan fails I make a new plan!)
From the very start, failure is what drives this movie forward. The meat of the opening
prison sequence, the mechanism through which the film s basic backstory and setting exposition is
delivered, Edgin s attempt to secure a pardon, only happens because Jarnathan, their feathery
ticket out, didn t turn up on time. Everything we see in the process, this first lavish glimpse of
Faerun, Chris Pine s weaselly, shifty performance, every memorable part of this opening segment is an
accident, is a pivot. And that s a pattern we see continue throughout going to meet Forge and Kira
at Castle Never turns into a scene of betrayal, and a narrowly-dodged execution. The attempt to
recruit Simon the sorcerer goes similarly awry, as does Doric s castle infiltration attempt,
and ditto with the corpse questioning, the bridge in the Underdark, and so forth. At its core,
this film s story is a simple one Edgin s trying to reunite his family, get his daughter back, that
never changes what turns this simple goal into an epic story is the one-step-forward-two-steps-back
of it all, the One Small Favour effect, the fact that things go wrong, and then the backup
plan goes wrong, and on, and on. Even before the low point, the heart to heart in the second act,
where it s all made rather explicit, it s clear that failure, that moments like these,
are the film s centre and that there s a type of joy the film finds in scrambling away from
catastrophe, a wild, exuberant glee in things going wrong, in the dice coming up snake eyes,
and in the desperate efforts of our characters to stay afloat in the ensuing chaos.
At one point, in one mess or another, Edgin tries to reassure the group, saying This is what we do,
we pivot but there s a way in which the we here goes beyond his party, goes beyond simply this
film s cast of characters. That we includes every D+D character, every D+D player. Because my fondly
remembered D+D disaster is not remotely unique. Every other D+D player I ve spoken to has at least
one story like mine, an unforgettable memory of a time when things went wrong, staggeringly wrong,
and it took all their skill, willpower, and luck to salvage anything of the situation. Failure,
and the subsequent pivot hitting rock bottom and bouncing back - that is fundamental to the
Dungeons and Dragons experience, and the film gets this, the film is all about this. Aren t you sick
of failing, a character asks Edgin, as it looks like all hope is lost. His answer is every viewer
s answer, is every D+D player s answer No. Of course not. How could you ever get sick of this?
When people talk about adaptation, they talk a lot about the importance of spiritual accuracy.
Some divergences from the plot, the setting, the backstory these are forgivable if the adaptation
is faithful in spirit and while this can be a useful concept, it s very subjective,
and almost impossible to define or quantify. So I m not going to say that this joyous embrace
of failure shows Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves capturing the spirit of the game,
and it s world. That may well be true, but I want to make a slightly more tangible
claim. I think Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis-Daley, the writer/director duo,
identified the ludic essence of its source material, and built their film around it. The
feeling of playing the game is utterly central here and the film never loses sight of it.
And while this focus on failure might be the major, or at least the most interesting example
of this adaptive dynamic, of translating not just the story of the game but the feel of playing it,
it s not the only one no, let s talk briefly about character.
The film has a lot of fun action, some really neat effects, humour that lands way more often than
not, but for my money, the thing that grounds all of this, the reason this feels like a great film
instead of a collection of fun moments and gags, is the rock-solid character work on display. Sure,
it s not flashy, it doesn't ever really surprise, it s not exactly a slow, deep character study,
but all of the main cast are fully realised, all of them have tangible, affecting arcs.
Edgin is a real tragic character. He is a good man, but there s just this touch of greed and
without spoiling too much, we see throughout the film that ultimately this is to blame,
he is to blame for the awful fate that just about ruined his life. That flaw s still here,
a decade or so later, and his story here is the story of him facing it down. Holga s a barbarian
who took family for granted, and in doing so, lost it her journey here is fighting to build,
or rebuild, rather, another family and reach out, actually embrace it. Simon and Doric don t receive
quite this level of focus, but still all of the sorcerer s actions are made against the weight
of his self-doubt, Doric s against her distrust, her struggle toward vulnerability. Our main cast
never comes close to feeling interchangeable, or skin-deep, and it s always clear why choices
are made, why this character can or can t do that thing. Story follows character, and in
subtle ways, then more obviously toward the end, character follows story. This might sound basic,
and maybe it is, but it s foregrounded here way more than is typical in the action-adventure genre
and I m not alone in contending this. A recent article from Polygon talks effusively about the
role of downtime in the film, the significance of the scenes that let characters breathe, the scenes
that let us see what drives them, and maybe more to the point, how these parts evoke those crucial
moments of memorable role play interaction you get in RPGs. I think that s bang on, but I think
the RPGness here goes beyond those moments of downtime, and that like that failure we discussed
above, the film s sense of character can be understood as part of its process of adaptation.
When I wrecked that campaign, all those years ago, when my assassin ruined the mission to take
an ill-fated crack at a price, it wasn t because I got bored, and it wasn t because I wanted to
watch the world burn. It was because that s what my character would have done. My actions
were dictated by his traits, his wants, his needs, his flaws. When you play a game like D&D,
action follows character, directly, and it really feels like this simple fact was always firmly in
mind during this film s production. That solid character focus makes for an engaging experience
but maybe just as importantly, it makes this feel like a tabletop campaign filmed.
Look, there s a lot of good stuff on display here. The stacked cast, all taking their roles
seriously? The magic that s actually magic, not grids and lasers, that looks amazing? The pretty
large amount of genuine laughs you get from all this? Even the really fun marketing (TabseN,
my beloved)? All absolutely this deserves praise, and I d love to see more of these films,
whether continuing with these characters or more standalone. But for my money, the most interesting
part of Honour Among Thieves is the way it translates that ludic essence, the feel of playing
Dungeons and Dragons, in this emphasis on failure and character. And given the cultural moment the
film s released in, given the renewed attention given to games and game adaptations in the biz,
I think that success has come at a useful time, because it s become clear that even if focusing
on that essence, the feel of playing may not be The Way to adapt a game, some foolproof formula
for cinematic success, it is certainly a way, a way that really worked here. So let s thank
character, let s thank failure for success. And I ll also thank you for watching! I know a
bunch of my regular viewers were probably hoping the Moon Knight retrospective d be out next,
not this awfully sorry! But that is coming soon, so stick around. If you want to help a fella out,
drop a like, a comment, mayhaps, and on the offchance anyone watching has recently
completed a grand heist, and has a lot of gold to dispose of? Patreon link s right there just
saying. Shoutout to all my current supporters especially Daniel Goldhorn, Heather Long,
Ryan Emerle, and WeirdyBeardy and I ll be back soon with more banger content. Take care!